Leader-Follower Consensus of Unicycles With Communication Range Constraints via Smooth Time-Invariant Feedback

We solve the full-consensus problem (in position and orientation) with connectivity maintenance for multiple nonholonomic vehicles in a leader-follower configuration. We rely on a polar-coordinates based model which is more natural for the problem setting. The proposed control law is smooth (in the domain of definition) time-invariant and uses only relative measurements, making it more suited for implementation. We establish asymptotic convergence to the consensus manifold as well as connectivity maintenance using the Lyapunov’s first method and cascaded systems theory. In addition, we illustrate our theoretical contributions experimentally .