Design of consensus protocol for nonholonomic systems under directed communication topology

In the real world, many physical systems are subject to nonholonomic constraints. In this paper, the problem of output consensus is investigated for such kind of systems in chained form. First, the consensus controller is developed for the strongly connected topology using the backstepping design technique. Then, the result is extended to the general directed topology via graph decomposition where consensus achievement among different strongly connected components is analyzed by means of input-to-state stability (ISS). Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.