Rendezvous of Nonholonomic Unmanned Ground Vehicles with Ultra-Wide-Angle Cameras

In this paper, a time-varying delay output feedback control method based on the potential barrier function is proposed, which can solve the communication delay and field-of-view (FOV) constraints of Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) clusters when communicating with ultra-wide-angle cameras. First, a second-order oscillator and an output feedback controller are utilized to feed back the position and direction of neighboring vehicles by exchanging control quantities and to solve the time-varying delay in the position computation of the ultra-wide-angle camera. Due to the limited target radiation range perceived by the camera, an FOV-constrained potential function is adopted to optimize the design of the sliding mode surface. The stability of the closed-loop control system is analyzed by applying the Lyapunov method. Finally, simulation experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the consensus scheme in addressing the communication delay and FOV constraint problem under two different initial conditions.