Distributed estimation and control of multiple nonholonomic mobile agents with external disturbances

Abstract This paper investigates the tracking control problem of nonholonomic multiagent systems with external disturbances. For this purpose, distributed finite time controllers (DFCs) based on the terminal sliding mode method are proposed to ensure that states of the agents track the states of the target in a finite time. Furthermore, a distributed estimator (DE) is designed for each agent to estimate the target's states. The stability analysis of DFCs and DE is also considered. Simulation examples demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed algorithms.