Multi-Robot Formation Control Via Consensus-Based Sliding Mode and Obstacle-Aware Adaptive Scaling

Abstract

This paper proposes a consensus-based sliding mode controller (CSMC) for multi-robot formation control. The framework integrates Laplacian-based consensus with sliding mode robustness and adaptive formation scaling to simultaneously achieve accurate formation tracking and high formation consistency, while ensuring flexibility in constrained environments. The approach is validated in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and real-world experiments with Mecanum-wheeled robots. Compared with conventional sliding mode control (SMC), CSMC achieves consistent improvements in formation consistency, tracking accuracy, and overall performance in both simulation and real-world experiments. When compared with flocking based approaches, CSMC provides substantially improved tracking performance and achieves better overall performance under consistency-prioritized evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of CSMC in achieving reliable formation tracking, consistent coordination, and adaptive formation scaling for multi-robot navigation.