Hybrid framework for consensus in fleets of non-holonomic robots

Abstract

This paper presents and analyses a hybrid strategy for the decentralized control of a fleet of non-holonomic robots having a common goal. Each robot has a smooth continuous-time dynamics but in the presented strategy its reference is piecewise constant. Consequently, the hybrid nature of the overall system is introduced by the sporadic updates of the references of the robots. Between two updates of the reference the robots do not need to communicate since each of them will simply apply a reference tracking control. At some discrete time instants the robots update their references based on their relative position with respect to some time-varying neighbors. Our results provide a sufficient consensus (formation realization) condition in term of a minimum duration between consecutive updates of the references. A numerical example illustrates the theoretical results.