Toshiharu Sugie

Toshiharu Sugie, Brian D. O. Anderson, Zhiyong Sun et al.

This paper considers a formation shape control problem for point agents in a two-dimensional ambient space, where the control is distributed, is based on achieving desired distances between nominated agent pairs, and avoids the possibility of reflection ambiguities. This has potential applications for large-scale multi-agent systems having simple information exchange structure. One solution to this type of problem, applicable to formations with just three or four agents, was recently given by considering a potential function which consists of both distance error and signed triangle area terms. However, it seems to be challenging to apply it to formations with more than four agents. This paper shows a hierarchical control strategy which can be applicable to any number of agents based on the above type of potential function and a formation shaping incorporating a grouping of equilateral triangles, so that all controlled distances are in fact the same. A key analytical result and some numerical results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zhiyong Sun, Toshiharu Sugie

Multi-agent coordination control usually involves a potential function that encodes information of a global control task, while the control input for individual agents is often designed by a gradient-based control law. The property of Hessian matrix associated with a potential function plays an important role in the stability analysis of equilibrium points in gradient-based coordination control systems. Therefore, the identification of Hessian matrix in gradient-based multi-agent coordination systems becomes a key step in multi-agent equilibrium analysis. However, very often the identification of Hessian matrix via the entry-wise calculation is a very tedious task and can easily introduce calculation errors. In this paper we present some general and fast approaches for the identification of Hessian matrix based on matrix differentials and calculus rules, which can easily derive a compact form of Hessian matrix for multi-agent coordination systems. We also present several examples on Hessian identification for certain typical potential functions involving edge-tension distance functions and triangular-area functions, and illustrate their applications in the context of distributed coordination and formation control.

Toshiharu Sugie, Ichiro Maruta

The dual Youla method for closed loop identification is known to have several practically important merits. Namely, it provides an accurate plant model irrespective of noise models, and fits inherently to handle unstable plants by using coprime factorization. In addition, the method is empirically robust against the uncertainty of the controller knowledge. However, use of coprime factorization may cause a big barrier against industrial applications. This paper shows how to derive a simplified version of the method which identifies the plant itself without coprime factorization, while enjoying all the merits of the dual Youla method. This simplified version turns out to be identical to the stabilized prediction error method which was proposed by the authors recently. Detailed simulation results are given to demonstrate the above merits.