Distributed Consensus-formation of Force-controlled Nonholonomic Robots with Time-varying Delays

Emmanuel Nuno (1) , Antonio Loria (2) , Tonatiuh Henández (3) , Mohamed Maghenem (4) , Elena Panteley (2, 5)

1 Universidad de Guadalajara
2 L2S - Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes
3 CUCEI - University of Guadalajara
4 University of California at Santa Cruz
5 ITMO University [Russia]

We solve the leaderless consensus-formation control problem for nonholonomic robots under the influence of time-varying communication delays and via smooth feedback. The control objective is to ensure that both the Cartesian positions of the vehicles and their orientations on the plane converge to a given position in a formation pattern, relatively to an a priori unknown barycenter and a common orientation, respectively. Our controller, being of proportional-plus-damping type and smooth time-varying, is easy to implement. Furthermore, it relies on δ-persistency of excitation to overcome the well-known obstacle that for nonholonomic systems a set-point is not stabilizable by smooth time-invariant feedback. We establish asymptotic convergence of the tracking errors and we provide some simulation results that support our theoretical findings.

Mots clés: Nonholonomic vehicles; formation control; consensus control; systems with time-delays

Domaines: Automatique; Robotique [cs.RO]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]

Emmanuel Nuno, Antonio Loria, Tonatiuh Henández, Mohamed Maghenem, Elena Panteley. Distributed Consensus-formation of Force-controlled Nonholonomic Robots with Time-varying Delays. Automatica, 2020, 120, pp.109114. ⟨10.1016/j.automatica.2020.109114⟩. ⟨hal-02901297⟩