A Unified Framework of Fully Distributed Time-Varying Formation Control for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems: An Observer Viewpoint
Wei Hua Jiang · 2019
This paper presents a unified framework of designing time-varying formation (TVF) controllers for general linear multi-agent systems (MAS) based on an observer viewpoint under the directed communication graph containing a spanning tree. For the large-scale MAS, the detailed procedure about how to design fully distributed controllers (FDC), which need the information of TVF shapes, observers and relative state measurements of neighbors and require no global information of communication graph, is demonstrated. A new format of TVF shapes with the property of translation, scalability, and rotation is proposed. The main contributions lie in the novel proposal of TVF shapes and the evolution of FDC design. A simulation to multiple nonholonomic vehicles is provided to validate the theoretical results.