Distributed coordinated tracking control for multiple nonholonomic systems with directed communication topology

In this paper, a distributed coordinated tracking control problem for a group of nonholonomic chained systems has been discussed under the assumption that the desired trajectory is available only to a part of neighboring agents. First, coordinated tracking controllers under the directed communication topology graph containing a spanning tree are designed for two subsystems, adaptive control gains are employed in the linear subsystem based on the state information of neighboring agents, and global information of the topology is not required to be known in the control laws. Then the backstepping strategy is applied in the rest of chained-form subsystem such that the state of all the agents converge to the state of the desired reference trajectory. Finally, an application is introduced and the simulation results are given to show the validity of proposed theoretical results.