Cost-effective distributed FTFC for uncertain nonholonomic mobile robot fleet with collision avoidance and connectivity preservation

In this paper,the fault-tolerant formation control(FTFC)problem is investigated for a group of uncertain nonholonomic mobile robots with limited communication ranges and unpredicted actuator faults,where the communication between the robots is in a directed one-to-one way.In order to guarantee the connectivity preservation and collision avoidance among the robots,some properly chosen performance functions are incorporated into the controller to per-assign the asymmetrical bounds for relative distance and bearing angle between each pair of adjacent mobile robots.Particularly,the resultant control scheme remains at a costeffective level because its design does not use any velocity information from neighbors,any prior knowledge of system nonlinearities or any nonlinear approximator to account for them despite the presence of modeling uncertainties,unknown external disturbances,and unexpected actuator faults.Meanwhile,each follower is derived to track the leader with the tracking errors regarding relative distance and bearing angle subject to prescribed transient and steady-state performance guarantees,respectively.Moreover,all the closed-loop signals are ensured to be ultimately uniformly bounded.Finally,a numerical example is simulated to verify the effectiveness of this methodology.

Multi-UAV cooperative target tracking with bounded noise for connectivity preservation

We investigate cooperative target tracking of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)with a limited communication range.This is an integration of UAV motion control,target state estimation,and network topology control.We first present the communication topology and basic notations for network connectivity,and introduce the distributed Kalman consensus filter.Then,convergence and boundedness of the estimation errors using the filter are analyzed,and potential functions are proposed for communication link maintenance and collision avoidance.By taking stable target tracking into account,a distributed potential function based UAV motion controller is discussed.Since only the estimation of the target state rather than the state itself is available for UAV motion control and UAV motion can also affect the accuracy of state estimation,it is clear that the UAV motion control and target state estimation are coupled.Finally,the stability and convergence properties of the coupled system under bounded noise are analyzed in detail and demonstrated by simulations.

Connectivity-preserving consensus of nonlinear switched multi-agent systems with predefined accuracy

This paper focuses on the connectivity-preserving consensus of nonlinear switched multi-agent systems with predefined accuracy.Accordingly,a unified error transformation is adopted to preserve the initial interaction pattern determined by agents’limited communication ranges and initial states.Meanwhile,the so-called congelation of variables method is used to handle the unknown aperiodically time-varying parameters,which are fast-varying in an unknown compact set with only their radii known a priori.In addition,a series of continuously differentiable functions are incorporated into the Lyapunov function to design the controller.Based on Lyapunov stability theory,the proposed control algorithm guarantees that the consensus errors converge with a predefined accuracy,whereas most existing connectivity-preserving results can only ensure uniform ultimate boundedness.Simultaneously,all closed-loop signals remain bounded.Finally,two simulations are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol.

Adaptive leader-following rendezvous and flocking for a class of uncertain second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems

In this paper, we study the leader-following rendezvous and flocking problems for a class of second-order nonlinear multi- agent systems, which contain both external disturbances and plant uncertainties. What differs our problems from the conventional leader-following consensus problem is that we need to preserve the connectivity of the communication graph instead of assuming the connectivity of the communication graph. By integrating the adaptive control technique, the distributed observer method and the potential function method, the two problems are both solved. Finally, we apply our results to a group of van der Pol oscillators.