Distributed control of nonholonomic mobile robots with or without position constraints under switching topology

The problem of consensus reaching for multiple nonholonomic mobile robots (NMRs) is investigated in this work. The information exchange of robots is modeled by switching interaction graphs, the union of which includes a directed spanning tree over a specific time. We design a distributed control protocol consisting of coordinate transformation and a new filter system. We also propose a consensus protocol that can additionally guarantee the satisfaction of the robot position constraints. By augmenting the interaction topology with part of the filter state and using the properties of the Laplacian matrix related to switching topologies, it is shown that under proposed protocols, practical consensus can be obtained and the boundedness of each signal in the closed-loop system is preserved. Finally, the feasibility of implementing our algorithm is validated by comparative simulation.