Nearest Neighbor-Based Rendezvous for Sparsely Connected Mobile Agents

In this paper, a convergent, nearest-neighbor, control protocol is suggested for agents with nontrivial dynamics. The protocol guarantees convergence to a common point in space even if each agent is restricted to communicate with a single nearest neighbor. The neighbor, however, is required to lie outside an arbitrarily small priority zone surrounding the agent. The control protocol consists of two layers interconnected in a provably correct manner. The first layer provides the guidance signal to a rendezvous point assuming that the agents have first-order dynamics. The other layer converts in a decentralized manner the guidance signal to a control signal that suits realistic agents, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and holonomic agents with second-order dynamics.