Trajectory Tracking Control of Unicycle Robots with Collision Avoidance and Connectivity Maintenance

In this paper, we focus on a multiple objective control problem for unicycle robots. By utilizing the gradients of collision avoidance and connectivity potential fields in designing reference orientations, we derive control laws for unicycle robots and show that they can track reference trajectories with bounded errors, which can be made arbitrarily small, while avoiding inter-agent collisions and ensuring that the communication among the agents is maintained. Additionally, we present experimental results where we illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed control laws by implementing them on a testbed with mobile robots.