Distributed consensus control of unicycle agents in the presence of external disturbances

In this paper, a distributed consensus control strategy is presented for a team of unicycle agents subject to external disturbances. Bounded disturbances with unknown dynamics on both translational and angular velocities are applied to the system. The key idea is to design the control inputs of each agent in such a way that, after a finite time, agents move with an acute angle with respect to a reference vector typically used for the consensus control of disturbance-free single-integrator agents. Convergence to consensus is then proved using Lyapunov theory. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed controller.