Finite-time flocking control of multiple nonholonomic mobile agents

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of finite-time flocking in the multi-agent nonholonomic system with proximity graph. With the aid of singular communication function and results from graph theory, a novel distributed control protocol is proposed, where each agent merely obtains state information of its neighbors. Based on the theory of finite-time stability, the proposed protocol can achieve flocking within a finite-time and an upper bound on the setting time can be derived. Furthermore, we can deduce several sufficient conditions to the problem under the assumption that the positions and relative distances of agents are unknown. These sufficient conditions show that there are always suitable gains that enable our proposed protocol to perform finite-time flocking control and maintain the connectivity of the graph for any given initial connected graphs. Finally, the theoretical results are validated by numerical simulations.