This work focused on nonlinear adaptive control laws to enable exact formation control in teams of nonholonomic mobile robots. A camera placed on one robot can extract accurate relative coordinates between two robots using a fiducial marker on the other robot. These relative position coordinates are enough to result in zero tracking errors even though the (constant) leader velocity is unknown and unmeasured, using an adaptive term in the control law.

The control law was implemented in an experiment (download video) wherein one robot follows another using a camera. The vision and control are implemented entirely on-board the follower robot using just a gumstix microprocessor.