Flocking Control under Virtual Leader-Follower with Link Failure

Abstract

For time-delay, noise and network congestion in the communication among agents, there are random communication link failures among agents. In the paper, we analyze the distributed flocking algorithms under virtual leader-follower model with random communication link failures. Under virtual leader-follower model, flocking algorithm can avoid diverging, but the performance of flocking algorithm with link failure often degrades. We analyze the impact brought by link failures on the flocking algorithm when part agents can’t receive the information of the virtual leader, and simulations are done. Results show that the performance of distributed flocking algorithm depends on the probability of link failure. Smaller is the probability of link failures among multi-agents, better is the performance of flocking algorithms with link failure.