Leader-follower Consensus of Unicycles with Communication Range Constraints via Smooth Time-invariant Feedback

Esteban Restrepo (1) , Antonio Loria (2) , Ioannis Sarras (1) , Julien Marzat (1)

1 DTIS, ONERA, Université Paris Saclay [Palaiseau]
2 L2S - Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes

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.

Mots clés: Lyapunov design; nonholonomic systems; Index Terms-Formation control; persistency of excitation

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

Esteban Restrepo, Antonio Loria, Ioannis Sarras, Julien Marzat. Leader-follower Consensus of Unicycles with Communication Range Constraints via Smooth Time-invariant Feedback. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 2021, 5 (2), pp.737-742. ⟨10.1109/LCSYS.2020.3005181⟩. ⟨hal-02901383⟩