Distributed Full-Consensus Control of Nonholonomic Vehicles Under Non-Differentiable Measurement Delays

Abstract

We address the problem of consensus control of second-order nonholonomic systems via distributed control under the assumption that each vehicle receives measured states from a set of neighbors, with a bounded, time-varying, but non-differentiable delay. The controller that we propose guarantees full consensus, in the sense that a common consensus point may be reached both in the Cartesian positions on the plane and the orientations of all robots referred to a fixed frame. Our controller is smooth, hence time-varying. Notably, it relies on a property of persistency of excitation. Our main statement guarantees uniform global asymptotic stability. Also, we provide some simulation results to illustrate our theoretical findings.