Prescribed Performance Distance-Based Formation Control of Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)
This work addresses formation control for multi-agent systems, offering improved robustness against shape distortions and incorrect convergence, but it is incremental as it builds on existing rigid graph theory and Lyapunov methods.
The paper tackles robust distance-based formation control for multi-agent systems under unknown disturbances, achieving connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance through prescribed performance bounds. It also extends to centroid maneuvering for disturbance-free agents, with decentralized control laws validated via simulation.
This paper presents a novel control protocol for robust distance-based formation control with prescribed performance in which agents are subjected to unknown external disturbances. Connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance among neighboring agents are also handled by the appropriate design of certain performance bounds that constrain the inter-agent distance errors. As an extension to the proposed scheme, distance-based formation centroid maneuvering is also studied for disturbance-free agents, in which the formation centroid tracks a desired time-varying velocity. The proposed control laws are decentralized, in the sense that each agent employs local relative information regarding its neighbors to calculate its control signal. Therefore, the control scheme is implementable on the agents' local coordinate frames. Using rigid graph theory, input-to-state stability, and Lyapunov based analysis, the results are established for minimally and infinitesimally rigid formations in 2-D or 3-D space. Furthermore, it is argued that the proposed approach increases formation robustness against shape distortions and can prevent formation convergence to incorrect shapes, which is likely to happen in conventional distance-based formation control methods. Finally, extensive simulation studies clarify and verify the proposed approach.