Consensus-based formation control for nonholonomic vehicles with parallel desired formations

This paper proposed a leaderless consensus-based formation control law with global convergence domain for multiple nonholonomic vehicles. We firstly studied the consensus control for two vehicles, where a global and asymptotical control strategy was introduced holding a symmetric structure. Next, with the aid of the convex combination in manifolds, we constructed a virtual system, based on which the consensus problem of multiple vehicles was converted to that of two vehicles, and the control law for multi-vehicle consensus was addressed. Then, according to the transformation from formation control to consensus control, we presented a global leaderless consensus-based formation controller for vehicles with parallel desired formations, where all the vehicles were parallel to each other in a straight line along the lateral direction. To verify the theoretical results, numerical simulations were given at the end.