Flocking of wheeled vehicles in the presence of large communication delay through a potential functional approach

This paper studies the flocking problem for a multi-agent system, where each agent is a vehicle with nonholonomic dynamics. In particular, we consider the case where the agents are subjected to an arbitrarily large communication delay. A distributed low gain control law is derived based on the gradient of an artificial potential function. We demonstrate using the Lyapunov functional approach that the proposed control law drives the multi-agent system into the stable flocking behavior. The effectiveness of the proposed control law is verified in numerical simulation.