Adaptive Collisions‐Free Tracking Control for Heterogeneous Multi‐Robot Systems Under Input Constraints

ABSTRACT For heterogeneous multi‐robot systems with unknown parameters and input constraints, the problem of simultaneous target tracking and collision avoidance is studied in this paper. A novel auxiliary system is proposed to generate the corresponding compensation signal to tackle the difficulty of controller design resulting from input constraints. For each heterogeneous robot system, a unique collision avoidance controller is constructed utilizing the repulsive potential field method. Then, the adaptive collisions‐free tracking control strategy is presented under the control framework of the proposed auxiliary system. It can be proved via Lyapunov stability theory that the designed controllers can allow the heterogeneous multi‐robot systems to track the reference target with collision avoidance and guarantee that all the closed‐loop signals in the multi‐robot systems are bounded. Subsequently, the validity of our control scheme is further verified through a common simulation example.