Distributed affine formation maneuver control of multi-agent systems 🗓 🗺
prof. Shiyu Zhao Autonomous
Systems and Robotics Group Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering University of Sheffield
Abstract
Formation control usually consists of two types of objectives. The first is to steer the agents to form a desired spatial pattern and the second is to achieve desired collective maneuvers so that the centroid, orientation, scale, and even shape of the formation can track any given time-varying references. Despite the recent advances in multi-agent formation control, distributed control laws that can simultaneously achieve the two objectives with global convergence guaranteed in arbitrary dimensions are still critically lacking. This seminar introduces a new formation control strategy based on stress matrices, which are generalized graph Laplacians that may contain zero or negative edge weights. With the proposed control laws, the centroid, orientation, scales in different directions, and even geometric pattern of the formation can all be changed continuously. The desired formation maneuvers are only accessible to the leaders. The proposed linear and nonlinear control laws are all globally stable and can be implemented in each agent’s local reference frame.