Decentralized formation control with connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance under limited and intermittent sensing

A decentralized switched controller is developed for dynamic agents to perform global formation configuration convergence while maintaining network connectivity and avoiding collision within agents and between stationary obstacles, using only local feedback under limited and intermittent sensing. Due to the intermittent sensing, constant position feedback may not be available for agents all the time. Intermittent sensing can also lead to a disconnected network or collisions between agents. Using a navigation function framework, a decentralized switched controller is developed to navigate the agents to the desired positions while ensuring network maintenance and collision avoidance.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ACC 201

Chatter-Free Distributed Control for Multi-agent Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robot

This paper proposes to design a chatter-free distributed control for multiagent nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot systems employing terminal exponential functions with graph theory. The terminal tracking criteria are estimated using the Lyapunov approach. The development of distributed control for nonholonomic multiagent wheeled robot systems is defined in the paper along with consensus tracking for undirected fixed/switched topologies. Numerical simulations have been done in order to assess the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed distributed control method in multiple scenarios

Consensus problems in networks of agents with switching topology and time-delays

In this paper, we discuss consensus problems for networks of dynamic agents with fixed and switching topologies. We analyze three cases: 1) directed networks with fixed topology; 2) directed networks with switching topology; and 3) undirected networks with communication time-delays and fixed topology. We introduce two consensus protocols for networks with and without time-delays and provide a convergence analysis in all three cases. We establish a direct connection between the algebraic connectivity (or Fiedler eigenvalue) of the network and the performance (or negotiation speed) of a linear consensus protocol. This required the generalization of the notion of algebraic connectivity of undirected graphs to digraphs. It turns out that balanced digraphs play a key role in addressing average-consensus problems. We introduce disagreement functions for convergence analysis of consensus protocols. A disagreement function is a Lyapunov function for the disagreement network dynamics. We proposed a simple disagreement function that is a common Lyapunov function for the disagreement dynamics of a directed network with switching topology. A distinctive feature of this work is to address consensus problems for networks with directed information flow. We provide analytical tools that rely on algebraic graph theory, matrix theory, and control theory. Simulations are provided that demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results