Adaptive sliding mode control for disturbed multirobot systems performing target tracking under continuously time-varying topologies

This article studies coordination control of the multirobot system for target tracking problem with disturbances in time-varying communication environment. An adaptive sliding mode control is designed to complete the target tracking task with the effect of disturbances and continuously time-varying topologies. This means that the communication between the robots is not switching among constant topologies but changes continuously along with time. The continuously time-varying topology is constructed by a set of fixed Laplacian matrices and variable scheduling functions, which is known as polytopic model structure. The designed adaptive sliding mode control can effectively lower the influence of disturbance and improve tracking performance even under the continuously time-varying topology. Furthermore, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained results.