Practical Time-Varying Formation Tracking Control for Multi-Agent Systems

This paper introduces the concept of formation switching in time-varying formation tracking (TVFT) control for linear time-invariant (LTI) multi-agent systems (MASs) under the collision avoidance constraints. One of the main challenges in designing a novel formation controller is that the leader agent does not prespecify the desired formation to the follower agents. Also, the former may change the desired formation to any other at the run time according to task requirements and environmental spatial constraints. Based on estimation of the so-called generator matrix and the formation vector, follower agents maintain the time-varying formation while tracking the leader. The uniform ultimate boundedness stability of the overall proposed distributed control scheme is proved using the Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the effectiveness of the formation switching in TVFT is demonstrated using a numerical example.