Autonomous Formation Control and Target Tracking in Distributed Multi-agent System

A Multi-agent System can be considered as distributed system consisting of multiple interacting intelligent agents acting on a common environment. Agents in multi-agent system achieve the global objective of the system by controlling the local parameters of individual agent. Self-organizing, self-steering and self-configuring capabilities are highly desired in the functioning of a distributed system. Nature inspired Flocking Algorithms have the potential to introduce these capabilities in the functioning of distributed system due to their inherent emergent behaviour. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, a novel algorithm is proposed for achieving self-organized circular formation control while tracking a target. Second, the proposed algorithm is analyzed for performance parameters and is found to be efficient. Simulations are carried out and the proposed algorithm is verified.