Observerless Output-Feedback Consensus-Based Formation Control of Second-Order Nonholonomic Systems

We present a solution to the problem of formation consensus control of second-order nonholonomic systems via output feedback. We contribute with a distributed consensus controller for force-controlled nonholonomic systems under the assumption that the forward and angular velocities are not measurable. Our main statement establishes uniform global asymptotic stability for the closed-loop system; this guarantees robustness with respect to bounded disturbances, in the sense of Malkin’s total stability, also known as local input-to-state stability.