Formation stabilization and resizing based on the control of inter-agent distances

Abstract

We propose a control strategy that could steer the group of mobile agents in the plane to achieve a specified formation. The control law could be implemented in a fully decentralized manner so that each agent moves on their own local reference frame. Under the acyclic minimally persistent graph topology, each agent measures the relative displacements of neighboring agents and then adjusts the distances between them to achieve the desired formation. As well as achieving a fixed formation, we could resize the formation only by changing the leader edge, which connects the leader with the first-follower in acyclic minimally persistent graph, without changing the structures of the control law. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.