  A group of wheeled robots with nonholonomic constraints is considered to
rendezvous at a common specified setpoint with a desired orientation while
maintaining network connectivity and ensuring collision avoidance within the
robots. Given communication and sensing constraints for each robot, only a
subset of the robots are aware or informed of the global destination, and the
remaining robots must move within the network connectivity constraint so that
the informed robots can guide the group to the goal. The mobile robots are also
required to avoid collisions with each other outside a neighborhood of the
common rendezvous point. To achieve the rendezvous control objective,
decentralized time-varying controllers are developed based on a navigation
function framework to steer the robots to perform rendezvous while preserving
network connectivity and ensuring collision avoidance. Only local sensing
feedback, which includes position feedback from immediate neighbors and
absolute orientation measurement, is used to navigate the robots and enables
radio silence during navigation. Simulation results demonstrate the performance
of the developed approach.
