A Switched Systems Approach to Unknown Environment Exploration with Intermittent State Feedback for Nonholonomic Systems

A method is provided to enable a nonholonomic vehicle to explore an unknown environment with intermittent state feedback. A maximum dwell-time condition is determined via a Lyapunov-based switched systems approach to maintain overall system stability despite the intermittent loss of state feedback and the presence of external disturbances. A minimum dwell-time condition is determined via a Lyapunov-based switched systems approach to ensure the tracking error converges within a desired neighborhood of the desired trajectory. Utilizing the proposed maximum and minimum dwell-time conditions, a nonholonomic vehicle's tracking error remains globally uniformly ultimately bounded, enabling the exploration of the feedback-denied region for a predetermined period of time, before acquiring state feedback.