Consensus of multiple nonholonomic chained form systems

Consensus problems of multiple nonholonomic systems are considered in this paper. This problem is simplified into consensus problems of two subsystems based on the cascaded structure of nonholonomic chained form systems. Continuous and hybrid distributed controllers have been constructed for these two subsystems respectively based on the theory of cascaded systems. Consensus of multiple nonholonomic chained form systems can be realized using the methodology proposed in this paper no matter whether the group reference signal is persistently exciting or not. Different to previous assumptions on group reference such as persistent excitation or converging to nonzero constant, the condition on the group reference signal have been further relaxed in this paper. Simulation results using Matlab have illustrated the effectiveness of the results presented in this paper. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.