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The purpose of this paper is to consider the leader-following formation control problem for nonholonomic vehicles based on a novel biologically inspired neurodynamics approach.

The interactions among the networked multi-vehicle system is modeled by an undirected graph. First, a distributed estimation law is proposed for each follower vehicle to estimate the state including the position, orientation and linear velocity of the leader. Then, a distributed formation tracking control law is designed based on the estimated state of the leader, where a bio-inspired neural dynamic is introduced to solve the impractical velocity jumps problem. Explicit stability and convergence analyses are presented using Lyapunov tools.

The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control law are demonstrated by numerical simulations and physical vehicle experiments. Consequently, the proposed protocol can successfully achieve the desired formation under connected topologies while tracking the trajectory generated by the leader.

This paper proposes a neurodynamics-based leader–follower formation tracking algorithm for multiple nonholonomic vehicles.