Leader-following Formation Control Based on Pursuit Strategies

The paper studies formation control of multi-agent systems under a directed acyclic graph. In a directed acyclic graph, the agents without neighbors are leaders and the others are followers. Leaders move in a formation with a time-varying velocity and followers can access the relative positions of their neighbors and the leaders' velocity. A local formation control law is proposed in the paper based on pursuit strategies and necessary and sufficient conditions for stability and convergence are derived. Moreover, the results are extended to the case with arbitrary communication delays, for which the steady-state formation is presented according both the control parameters and time delays.