A Distributed Formation Stabilization Control Protocol of Nonholonomic Unicycle Agents

This paper investigates the formation stabilization control problem of a group of networked nonholonomic unicycle agents with a static leader. A distributed observer is presented for each agent to estimate the position and orientation of leader. A feedback controller is then constructed to make the agents form the desired geometric shape centered at the leader. The control protocol consists of the observer and the feedback controller. With this protocol, each agent computes the control signals only using its own state and its neighbors' information. Based on Lyapunov method and Barbalat lemma, stability analysis shows that all the unicycle agents globally asymptotically make into the desired shape centered at the position of leader, and that their orientations tend to the orientation of leader, provided that the communication graph has a spanning tree with at least one root agent knowing the information of leader. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.