On the tight formation for multi-agent dynamical systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the real-time control of multiple agents in the presence of disturbances and non-convex collision avoidance constraints. The goal is to guarantee the convergence towards a tight formation. A single optimal control problem is solved based on a prediction of the future evolution of the system and the resulting controller is implemented in a centralized way. At the supervision level, it is shown that the decision about which agents should take on what role in the desired tight formation is equivalent with a classical pairing (or task assignment) problem. Furthermore, the pairing is re-evaluated at each iteration. The proposed method exhibits effective performance validated through some illustrative examples. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.