Distance-based acyclic minimally persistent formations with non-steepest descent control

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a control law to maneuver a group of mobile autonomous agents in the plane, where the information architecture among the agents is modeled by a directed graph. The objective is to achieve a prescribed formation shape by adjusting the inter-agent distances only, which is called the distance-based formation control. The proposed control law uses only relative position measurements so that each agent achieves its control objective in a decentralized manner. On the basis of the proposed control law, we analyze the convergence property of squared-distance errors. We first study a triangular formation and then extend the results of to acyclic minimally persistent formations having more than three agents. We also examine the formation including a moving leader. Numerical simulations and experiments with mobile robot platform are included.