Rendezvous of nonholonomic multiple unicycles with connectivity maintenance

In this paper, the problem of distributed rendezvous of a network of multiple unicycles with nonholonomic kinematics is investigated. In contrast to traditional artificial potential field (APF) based approaches, decentralized and bounded time-varying continuous control protocols are developed via devising a class of smooth and bounded navigation functions which is free of local minima and nicely integrates consensus requirement, connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, simultaneously. It is shown that the proposed bounded controllers could enable the group to converge to the common position with a common orientation while preserving the network connectivity during the system evolution if the underlying network is initially connected. Finally, simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms.