Robust Connectivity Preserving Rendezvous of Multirobot Systems Under Unknown Dynamics and Disturbances

This paper studies a robust connectivity preserving rendezvous problem for a leader-following multirobot system. Only a small group of mobile robots is informed to have access to the leader's information. A distributed, robust, dynamic, control law is proposed such that connectivity-preserving rendezvous is achieved regardless of the unknown nonlinear dynamics and disturbances. Although the multirobot network has a dynamic network topology, the developed controller is able to maintain the connectivity of an initially connected communication network. Using the tools from algebraic graph theory, Lyapunov method, and nonsmooth analysis, sufficient conditions on the asymptotic convergence of the closed-loop multirobot systems are derived. A numerical example and simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.