Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems With Nonholonomic Restrictions via Lyapunov’s Direct Method

International audienceThis paper presents a smooth time-varying δ-persistently exciting controller for full consensus of autonomous nonholonomic vehicles modelled as unicycles. This consists in the robots assuming a common prescribed Cartesian position relative to an unknown barycentre and an unknown common orientation. More significantly, for the first time in the literature, a strict Lyapunov function is provided and uniform global asymptotic stability for the closed-loop system is established. This is well beyond weaker convergence properties that are more commonly guaranteed in the literature