Circular motion of multiple nonholonomic robots under switching topology with ordinal ranking. Issue 15 (October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chen, Guoyong; Fu, Weiming; Kang, Yu; Qin, Jiahu; Zheng, Wei Xing
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Franklin Institute. Volume 357:Issue 15(2020)
• Page Start: 10737
• Page End: 10756
• Publication Date: 2020-10
• Subjects: Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals; Patents -- United States -- Periodicals; 505
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfranklin.2020.07.041
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-0032

Abstract

Abstract: This paper investigates the circular motion of a group of n ( n ≥ 2) nonholonomic robots over time-varying communication networks. We aim to achieve a balanced circular motion centered at a location determined by each robot under the assumption that the global ranking of any robot is unknown. A back-stepping based controller is firstly designed to make all the robots rotate around a common center, the position of which is obtained through executing a consensus algorithm by each robot. Then, the maximum and minimum consensus algorithm and a distributed modified ordinal ranking algorithm are applied to set the rotation radius, angular velocity, and orientation parameters in a distributed manner such that all the robots can uniformly space on the common circle. At last, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is illustrated through a simulation example.