Distributed extremum seeking and formation control for nonholonomic mobile network

In this paper, an integrated control and optimization problem is studied in the context of formation and coverage of a cluster of nonholonomic mobile robots. In particular, each communication channel is modeled by its outage probability, and hence, connectivity is maintained if the outage probability is less than a certain threshold. The objective of the communication network is to not only maintain resilient communication quality but also extend the network coverage. An information theory based performance index is defined to quantify this control objective. Unlike most of the existing results, the proposed cooperative control design does not assume the knowledge of any gradient (of the performance index). Rather, a distributed extremum seeking algorithm is designed to optimize the connectivity and coverage of the mobile network. The proposed approach retains all the advantages of cooperative control, and it can not only perform extremum seeking individually, but also ensures a consensus of estimates between any pair of connected systems. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed methodology.