Collisions-Free and Connectivity-Preserving Distributed Cooperative Output Regulation of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems
Longbin Fu, Liwei An · IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering · 2025
The existing distributed cooperative output regulation schemes have designed safe command signals for collisions/obstacle avoidance. However, in large-scale multiagent system (MAS) formations, due to transient tracking errors or formation changes for collision/obstacle avoidance, the distance between an agent and its neighboring agents exceeds their communication range, leading to disconnection that changes the command signal, ultimately disrupting cooperation. To address this, we design a novel nonlinear command signal, featuring two artificial-delayed trajectories and a delay-free observer-governor state, whose coefficients are adaptively adjusted by three dynamic barrier functions to avoid collisions and preserve connectivity. It is demonstrated that the MAS can adaptively reconfigure its formation in a distributed manner to avoid collisions and preserve connectivity when entering the region covered by the barrier functions, and rapidly recover the desired formation along with the command signal after moving away from the coverage range of obstacle-avoidance barrier function. Finally, the results obtained from comparative simulations confirm the efficacy of the proposed method.