Leader-Follower Consensus of Unicycles With Communication Range Constraints via Smooth Time-Invariant Feedback

Abstract

We solve the full-consensus problem (in position and orientation) with connectivity maintenance for multiple nonholonomic vehicles in a leader-follower configuration. We rely on a polar-coordinates based model which is more natural for the problem setting. The proposed control law is smooth (in the domain of definition) time-invariant and uses only relative measurements, making it more suited for implementation. We establish asymptotic convergence to the consensus manifold as well as connectivity maintenance using the Lyapunov's first method and cascaded systems theory. In addition, we illustrate our theoretical contributions experimentally.

Distributed Full-Consensus Control of Multi-Robot Systems with Range and Field-of-View Constraints

“…In this paper we extend the results obtained in [14], where a distributed controller achieving full consensus of multiple vehicles in a leader-follower configuration is proposed, albeit considering only relative-distance constraints. More precisely, herein the full-consensus problem is solved for multi-agent systems subject to both distance and fieldof-view constraints and interacting over an arbitrary leaderfollower topology, that is, a directed spanning tree graph.…”

“…Moreover it naturally leads to the design of controllers that rely only on local relative measurements -cf. [14], [15].…”

“…Therefore it is a valid barrier Lyapunov function for the closed-loop system. Now, following the backstepping approach, the virtual input is designed as [14],…”