Time-Varying Formation Control of Nonholonomic Multi-Agent Systems

As the representative of an intelligent autonomous system, formation control of multi-agent systems is of great significance. In this paper, the leader-follower time-varying formation control problem for nonholonomic multi-agent systems has been considered using the bearing measurement. The main contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) The multi-agent system is modeled by a nonholonomic model, which is more challenging than a linear model; (2) The formation pattern can be time-varying handled by two leaders, which is significant to practical application. Specifically, we design a distributed bearing-based formation control law for the multi-agent systems. Under the proposed proportional-integral (PI) control scheme, the agents can achieve the target formation defined by the inter-bearing of agents. By changing the motions of the two leaders, the target formation can be maintained and time-varying. Finally, the simulation and experiment results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.