An Application of Distributed Spatial Formation Control with Multiplex Information Networks over Directed Graphs
Kimberly A. Witke, Ahmet Taha Koru, Tansel Yucelen · AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum · 2022
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1219.vid Increasing complexity of civilian, military, and scientific tasks requires the spatial properties of agent teams to change in real-time. However, the single layer networked structure of existing distributed control algorithms may not provide the necessary flexibility to address complicated tasks through local interactions. To provide a remedy for controlling the spatial properties of multiagent formations in real-time, multiplex information networks (that is, networks having multiple layers) have been recently introduced over undirected graphs. In this paper, our contribution is to provide an important system-theoretical generalization over directed graphs. Specifically, we present a distributed control architecture that has multiple directed graph layers. The key aspect of our architecture is that the size and the orientation of a given formation can be controlled in real-time through local interactions when each directed graph layer has a spanning tree property. In addition to providing a rigorous stability analysis of our architecture, an illustrative numerical example is also included to demonstrate its efficacy.