Collision-free coordination of a group of unicycle mobile robots

We propose a method for collision-free coordination of a group of unicycle mobile robots, which can be used for transportation tasks in large warehouses. A supervisory sys-tem assigns to each robot its reference path, together with the preferable velocity profile as a function of position along the path. The reference paths and velocity profiles do not necessarily prevent collisions among the robots. Feedback controllers of individual robots coordinate the robot motions along the assigned paths to ensure collision-free movements. To design a collision-free tracking control scheme, we make use of a standard kinematic model of unicycle robots in Cartesian space [1]. From this model we derive equations of tracking error dynamics. Unlike the error equations that are often used in the literature, e.g. [1], we present equa