Partial stabilization of nonholonomic systems with application to multi-agent coordination

This paper focuses on the problem of constructing time-varying feedback laws that asymptotically stabilize a given part of the state variables for nonlinear control-affine systems. It is assumed that the class of systems under consideration satisfies nonlinear controllability conditions with respect to the stabilizable variables. Under these assumptions, a time-periodic feedback control is constructed explicitly by using the inversion of the matrix composed of the control vector fields and their Lie brackets. The proposed control design scheme is applied to solving the leader-following problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems. These results are illustrated with two examples of nonholonomic control problems: the partial stabilization of a rolling disc and the leader-following task for two unicycles.