Leader-follower Type Distance-based Formation Control of a Group of Autonomous Agents

Abstract

We study distance-based formation control of a group of mobile agents consisting of several leaders and the remaining followers. The leaders sense their own positions with respect to a global reference frame whereas the followers sense only relative positions of their neighbors with respect to their own local reference frames. The relative position sensing topology is given as a directed acyclic graph. The objective of the agents is to reach their desired positions in the global reference frame. By applying a distance-based control law to the followers, we allow the agents to reach their desired positions if the sensing graph satisfies some graph rigidity conditions. Further we study the case that the desired positions are time-varying.