Flocking of multi-agent nonholonomic systems with unknown leader dynamics and relative measurements

In this paper, we consider the distributed flocking control problem of multi-agent nonholonomic systems with a virtual leader whose dynamics is unknown; state information is time varying and not available to all agents under both fixed and switching topologies. On the basis of the relative velocity and orientation information of neighboring agents, two distributed discontinuous control protocols are designed for fixed and switching topologies, respectively. By using tools from algebraic graph theory and nonsmooth analysis, the proposed distributed discontinuous control protocols guarantee that the velocities and orientations of the agents exponentially converge to the velocity and orientation of the virtual leader, respectively, while ensuring collision avoidance of the whole group, if the interaction graph among agents is undirected and the virtual leader with bounded time-varying velocity has directed paths to other agents. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.