Saturated control of time-varying formations and trajectory tracking for unicycle multi-agent systems

We propose a synchronization approach to solve a problem where multiple unicycle agents are required to follow individual reference trajectories while maintaining a time-varying formation. Motions of the agents are synchronized thanks to coupling terms in their feedback control laws. Under saturation constraints on the control signals, our control laws guarantee global asymptotic zeroing of the synchronization errors and global asymptotic stability of the tracking error dynamics. For stronger controller couplings, the robustness of formation keeping to perturbations is increased. The proposed approach is successfully validated in experiments.