A Novel Connectivity-Preserving Control Design for Rendezvous Problem of Networked Uncertain Nonlinear Systems

This article proposes a novel and robust connectivity-preserving rendezvous control design for a group of uncertain nonlinear multiagent systems with communication constraint where each agent has a limited sensing range. The control design can work under the assumption that the communication network is initially connected and is characterized by two distinguishing features. First, a new potential function is provided not only to maintain the existing and newly added links by the hysteresis rule but also to overcome the difficulty imposed by the nonlinear terms from system dynamics. Second, by constructing a series of lemmas, a connectivity-preserving stabilizing control law is presented to solve the robust stabilization problem with connectivity preservation for a time-varying nonlinear system, which is a special case of the augmented system with both dynamic and static uncertainties obtained via internal model design. After further incorporating the adaptive control technique, regardless of uncertain parameters and external disturbances in the multiple nonlinear subsystems, the leader-following rendezvous with connectivity preservation problem is finally solved by a distributed connectivity-preserving controller with parameter update law.