Formation tracking control in open multiagent systems with general linear dynamics

Abstract

This paper studies the formation tracking problem of the so-called open multiagent systems. In these systems, agents can freely join or leave at any time, i.e. the system sizes are changeable. To achieve formation tracking control in these systems, we propose a general theoretical analysis framework that consists of a formation adjustment strategy and a formation tracking protocol. Therein, the former is used to adjust the predefined task-oriented formation shape to the varying size of the system. This strategy is built on the existing scalable self-healing idea and then modified by a size estimation method. The latter is used to drive the present followers to form the adjusted formation and track a leader. To accommodate undirected and directed graphs, two distributed formation tracking protocols are designed respectively. Due to possible agent migration, the designed tracking protocols are endowed with self-adaptive ability, i.e. without depending on global topology information. Then, their convergence properties are analysed using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, two simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.