Composite Safety Collaborative Control for Multiple Nonholonomic Vehicles against Dual Motion Windups

This paper introduces a novel secure collaborative framework for multiple nonholonomic vehicles, featuring a forewarning switching mechanism, adaptive anti-windup strategies, and nonholonomic vehicle kinematics to ensure efficient obstacle and collision avoidance under velocity and acceleration windups. The framework’s core is a secure trajectory generation algorithm that leverages acceleration envelopes to avoid restricted zones and address dual windup challenges. It is enhanced by an enhanced artificial potential function for precise nonholonomic vehicle navigation during critical evasion manoeuvres. It employs dynamic auxiliary systems, designed with switchable safety acceleration envelopes and kinematic adjustments, to mitigate oscillations caused by saturation in the formation process. The proposed warning system, triggered by proximity to obstacles, dynamically assigns collaborative roles to minimize the risk of oscillatory behaviour due to competing objectives of formation integrity and collision avoidance. The framework’s effectiveness and the improved smoothness and safety of coordination tasks are demonstrated through comparative experiments with nonholonomic vehicle clusters.

1 Introduction

The study of collaborative strategies for nonholonomic vehicles (NVs) garners significant attention for their collective capabilities in applications like exploration and logistics [1]. Among the prevalent strategies for controlling multiple NVs, such as the leader-follower [2], behavior-based [3], virtual structure [4], and graph-based approaches [5], the leader-follower model stands out. Its appeal lies in its straightforwardness, making it a preferred choice for theoretical and practical implementations [6].