Adaptive flocking control of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots with limited communication ranges

This paper investigates the flocking problem of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots under the situations that all parameters of the robots are unknown and the robots are of limited communication ranges. Backstepping technique based distributed control schemes are proposed by introducing a p-time differential function. This function is embedded into a potential function to design control laws for flocking. The controllers guarantee that no collisions between any two robots occur, and no switching of controllers is needed. The size of the flock is bounded and the robots will go to an equilibrium set as time goes to infinity. Simulations illustrate the results.