Distributed nonlinear control of mobile autonomous multi-agents

This paper studies the distributed nonlinear control of mobile autonomous agents with variable and directed topology. A new distributed nonlinear design scheme is presented for multi-agent systems modeled by double-integrators. With the new design, the outputs of the controlled agents asymptotically converge to each other, as long as a mild connectivity condition is satisfied. Moreover, the velocity (derivative of the output) of each agent can be restricted to be within any specified neighborhood of the origin, which is of practical interest for systems under such physical constraint. The new design is still valid if one of the agents is a leader, and in this case, the outputs of the followers asymptotically converge to the output of the leader.