Coordination of a Swarm of Unicycle Robots via First-Order Dynamic Couplings

Coordination of multi-agent systems is an active and ongoing research topic. In particular, there exist several coordination strategies for multi-agent systems, in which the interaction between the agents is via static couplings, i.e. couplings that are constructed using static feedback. In contrast, this paper presents a novel coordination strategy, which introduces the use of dynamic couplings to coordinate a group of unicycle robots following a desired trajectory. The proposed control-scheme is composed by a nonlinear tracking controller and a first-order dynamic coupling. One advantage of this scheme is that, with respect to an energy index, the energy required by the dynamic coupling to perform a cooperative task is lower than the energy required by a traditional scheme based on static coupling. The stability of the closed-loop system is formally demonstrated by using the Lyapunov theory and the obtained theoretical results are illustrated with numerical simulations and validated through experiments. Also, a comparison of the proposed strategy against a coordination scheme reported in the literature, which is based on traditional static coupling, is provided. The results show that the proposed scheme has some practical implications, including reduction of the steady state error and reduced overshoot during the transient.