Spatial Coordination of Multiple Nonholonomic Agents With Sensory Connectivity Maintenance

This article aims to propose a general control strategy for coordination of multiple nonholonomic agents in three dimensional space. For real-world applications, since the field sensor equipped on the mobile agents for local information detection and estimation has some limited detecting range, it is necessary to guarantee that the nearby agents must stay within this range of the onboard sensor. This is called sensory connectivity maintenance. A function termed as coordination function with sensory connectivity maintenance (CFSCM) is defined to describe the performances of the coordination as well as the sensory connectivity status between the agents. Then, a general control strategy is designed based on the proposed CFSCM for spatial coordination of multiple nonholonomic agents with sensory connectivity maintenance. Moreover, the applications of the proposed control strategy for formation with omnidirectional sensors and flocking with directional sensors are shown, respectively. Finally, some numerical examples are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis.