This paper addresses a distributed connectivity-preserving synchronized tracking problem of multiple uncertain nonholonomic mobile robots with limited communication ranges. The information of the time-varying leader robot is assumed to be accessible to only a small fraction of follower robots. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a new distributed nonlinear error surface for dealing with both the synchronized tracking and the preservation of the initial connectivity patterns among nonholonomic robots. Based on this nonlinear error surface, the recursive design methodology is presented to construct the approximation-based local adaptive tracking scheme at the robot dynamic level. Furthermore, a technical lemma is established to analyze the stability and the connectivity preservation of the total closed-loop control system in the Lyapunov sense. An example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

中文翻译：

---

网络不确定非完整移动机器人分布式自适应同步跟踪的连通性保持方法


本文解决了通信范围有限的多个不确定非完整移动机器人的分布式保持连接同步跟踪问题。假设随时间变化的领导机器人的信息只能被一小部分跟随机器人访问。本文的主要贡献是引入一种新的分布式非线性误差面，用于处理非完整机器人之间的同步跟踪和初始连接模式的保存。基于该非线性误差面，提出了递归设计方法，在机器人动态层面构建基于近似的局部自适应跟踪方案。此外，还建立了技术引理来分析李亚普诺夫意义上的全闭环控制系统的稳定性和连通性保持。提供了一个例子来说明所提出的方法的有效性。