On the State Agreement Problem for Multiple Unicycles with Varying Communication Links

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized feedback control strategy that drives a system of multiple nonholonomic kinematic unicycles to agreement. The communication links between the members of the team may change over time and hence the communication topology is dynamic. The case of static communication topology was dealt in the previous work of the authors (2006). The proposed nonholonomic control law is discontinuous and time-invariant and tools from nonsmooth stability theory and matrix theory are used to check the stability of the overall system. Similarly to the linear case, the convergence of the multi-agent system relies on the connectivity of the communication graph that represents the inter-agent communication topology. The convergence properties are verified through computer simulations