A dynamics controller design method based on characteristic model is proposed for the formation control problem of car-like mobile robots. Only kinematics controller is not enough for some cases such as the environment is rugged, and the dynamics parameters of the robot are time-varying. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the responding speed of the mobile robots and maintain high formation accuracy. First, we obtain the kinematic error state equations according to the

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... leader-follower method. A kinematics controller is designed and the stability is proved by Lyapunov theory. Then the characteristic model of the dynamics inner loop is established. A sliding mode controller is designed based on the second order discrete model, and the stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed. Finally, simulations are designed in MATLAB and Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 (MRDS) to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.