Connectivity Preservation in Nonholonomic Multi-Agent Systems: A Bounded Distributed Control Strategy

This technical note is concerned with the connectivity preservation of a group of unicycles using a novel distributed control scheme. The proposed local controllers are bounded, and are capable of maintaining the connectivity of those pairs of agents which are initially within the connectivity range. This means that if the network of agents is initially connected, it will remain connected at all times under this control law. Each local controller is designed in such a way that when an agent is about to lose connectivity with a neighbor, the lowest-order derivative of the agent´s position that is neither zero nor perpendicular to the edge connecting the agent to the corresponding neighbor, makes an acute angle with this edge, which is shown to result in shrinking the edge. The proposed methodology is then used to develop bounded connectivity preserving control strategies for the consensus problem as one of the unprecedented contributions of this work. The theoretical results are validated by simulation.