In this paper synchronization of both the orientation and velocity for a group of unicycle robots is studied. It is assumed that a robot can only detect and obtain information from those robots that lie in the proximity (within certain distance). A minimum dwell time is imposed on the updating of neighborhood relation in the controller in order to avoid introducing chattering in the closed-loop system that may be caused by abrupt changes of the relation, which as a consequence implies that the neighbor information will be updated only at discrete time instants in the control. In the paper a distributed feedback control law is designed for each agent, and a sufficient condition for uniformly and independently distributed initial states is provided for reaching the synchronization, which depends on the neighborhood radius, the maximum initial translational velocity and the dwell time.
QC 20160118