Distributed formation control with relaxed motion requirements

Heterogeneous formation shape control with interagent bearing and distance constraints involves the design of a distributed control law that ensures the formation moves such that these interagent constraints are achieved and maintained. This paper looks at the design of a distributed control scheme to solve different formation shape control problems in an ambient two‐dimensional space with bearing, distance and mixed bearing and distance constraints. The proposed control law allows the agents in the formation to move in any direction on a half‐plane and guarantees that despite this freedom, the proposed shape control algorithm ensures convergence to a formation shape meeting the prescribed constraints. This work provides an interesting and novel contrast to much of the existing work in formation control where distance‐only constraints are typically maintained and where each agent's motion is typically restricted to follow a very particular path. A stability analysis is sketched, and a number of illustrative examples are also given. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bearing‐only control of directed cycle formations: Almost global convergence and hardware implementation

In this article, we study bearing‐only control of directed cyclic formations. First, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the bearing constraints so that the directed cycle formation of n‐agents in (n?1)‐dimensional space is infinitesimally bearing rigid. Second, a bearing‐only control law which only allows motions perpendicular to the desired bearing vector is proposed. Under this control law, the agents globally asymptotically converge to a desired formation which is fully determined from their initial positions and desired bearing vectors. Finally, the proposed formation control law is implemented on mobile robots to support the analysis.     

Distance-based acyclic minimally persistent formations with non-steepest descent control

In this paper, we propose a control law to maneuver a group of mobile autonomous agents in the plane, where the information architecture among the agents is modeled by a directed graph. The objective is to achieve a prescribed formation shape by adjusting the inter-agent distances only, which is called the distance-based formation control. The proposed control law uses only relative position measurements so that each agent achieves its control objective in a decentralized manner. On the basis of the proposed control law, we analyze the convergence property of squared-distance errors. We first study a triangular formation and then extend the results of to acyclic minimally persistent formations having more than three agents. We also examine the formation including a moving leader. Numerical simulations and experiments with mobile robot platform are included.     

Bearing-based formation stabilization using event-triggered control

This article studies two distributed bearing-based event-triggered schemes to achieve formation stabilization. We focus on systems with double-integrator dynamics with bearings sensing capabilities. Firstly, we propose a bearing-only event-triggered condition (ETC) that is edge-dependent which drives the control updates of the agents using only information dependent on relative sensed quantities. Secondly, along with bearing measurements we make use of local agent state measurements to arrive at an ETC that uses this collective measurement to drive the sensing and control updates of an agent. In doing so, we propose a new control law that renders the final formation stationary. Simulations are provided to verify the validity of the proposed algorithms.     

利用方位角信息的移动机器人编队控制

本文以移动机器人为研究对象,仅利用方位角信息实现多智能体系统的编队控制.为实现大规模编队和队形的缩放控制,智能体被分为领航者、第1跟随者以及其余跟随者.首先,考虑智能体之间相对位置信息难以精确测量的情形,设计仅用方位角信息的估计算法获得准确的相对位置;然后,基于获得的相对位置信息设计第1跟随者的控制算法,使得第一跟随者...     

Distributed control of angle-constrained cyclic formations using bearing-only measurements

This paper studies distributed control of multi-vehicle formations with angle constraints using bearing-only measurements. It is assumed that each vehicle can only measure the local bearings of their neighbors and there are no wireless communications among the vehicles. The desired formation is a cyclic one, whose underlying information flow is described by an undirected cycle graph. We propose a distributed bearing-only formation control law that ensures local exponential or finite-time stability. Collision avoidance between any vehicles can be locally guaranteed in the absence of inter-vehicle distance measurements.     

Bearing-based formation manoeuvre control of nonholonomic multi-agent systems

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns on the bearing-based leader–follower formation manoeuvre control problem for two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) multi-agent systems with nonholonomic constraint. The target formation is defined by relative-bearing measurements, which, for example, can be obtained from onboard cameras. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, a distributed formation manoeuvre control law is proposed for 2D nonholonomic agents according to the inter-bearing measurement. The multi-agent systems can achieve the desired formation which is defined by the bearings information. The formation manoeuvre can be achieved by steering at least two leaders. Secondly, the control law is nontrivially extended to 3D nonholonomic multi-agents systems. The leader–follower formation tracking problem can also be solved by the proposed proportional-integral control scheme. Simulation results for 2D and 3D nonholonomic multi-agents systems are presented. Experiments that used ground mobile robots verify the effectiveness of the proposed control laws.     

Development of redundant rigidity theory for formation control

Multiagent formation control may proceed by ensuring that designated pairs of agents maintain a specified distance between each other, in order that the overall shape of the formation can be preserved while it translates or rotates. A minimally rigid formation is one in which loss of any one such constraint or link means that individual agent motions can occur, which do not preserve the shape of the formation. Recognizing that real‐world formations may suffer link loss and even agent loss, this paper presents a systematic approach to defining a measure for redundant or nonminimal rigidity, which is the property that formation shape will still be preserved in the face of loss of a certain designated number of distance constraints or formation agents. Most of the results are concerned with advancing a deterministic measure, but this paper also indicates circumstances under which a statistical measure may be relevant. For illustration, the paper analyses a number of standard formations to establish their levels of redundancy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Mobile Agents

This paper considers two cooperative control problems for nonholonomic mobile agents. In the first problem, we discuss the design of cooperative control laws such that a group of nonholonomic mobile agents cooperatively converges to some stationary point under various communication scenarios. Dynamic control laws for each agent are proposed with the aid of $sigma $-processes and results from graph theory. In the second problem, we discuss the design of cooperative control laws such that a group of mobile agents converges to and tracks a target point which moves along a desired trajectory under various communication scenarios. By introducing suitable variable transformations, cooperative control laws are proposed. Since communication delay is inevitable in cooperative control, in each of the above cooperative control problems, we analyze the effect of delayed communication on the proposed controllers. As applications of the proposed results, formation control of wheeled mobile robots is discussed. It is shown that our results can be successfully used to solve formation control problem. To show effectiveness of the proposed approach, simulation results are included.      

Introduction to mobile agents

This article will lead you into the world of mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes it much easier to design, implement and maintain distributed systems. You will find that mobile agents reduce network traffic and provide an effective means of overcoming network latency. Perhaps most important, through their ability to operate asynchronously and independently of the process that created them, they help you to construct highly robust and fault-tolerant systems thereby directly or indirectly benefiting the end user.Read on and let us introduce you to software agents, including mobile as well as stationary agents. We will explain the benefits of mobile agents and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems. This article then concludes with a brief overview of some contemporary mobile agent systems.This article is based on a chapter of a book by the authors entitledProgramming and Deploying Java ^TM Mobile Agents with Aglets ^TM, ISBN 0-201-32582-9, Addison-Wesley, 1998.     

High‐precision formation control of nonlinear multi‐agent systems with switching topologies: A learning approach

Arbitrary high precision is considered one of the most desirable control objectives in the relative formation for many networked industrial applications, such as flying spacecrafts and mobile robots. The main purpose of this paper is to present design guidelines of applying the iterative schemes to develop distributed formation algorithms in order to achieve this control objective. If certain conditions are met, then the control input signals can be learned by the developed algorithms to accomplish the desired formations with arbitrary high precision. The systems under consideration are a class of multi‐agent systems under directed networks with switching topologies. The agents have discrete‐time affine nonlinear dynamics, but their state functions do not need to be identical. It is shown that the learning processes resulting from the relative output formation of multi‐agent systems can converge exponentially fast with the increase of the iteration number. In particular, this work induces a distributed algorithm that can simultaneously achieve the desired relative output formation between agents and regulate the movement of multi‐agent formations as desired along the time axis. The illustrative numerical simulations are finally performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed distributed formation algorithms. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Formations on directed cycles with bearing‐only measurements

This paper studies a bearing‐only–based formation control problem for a group of single‐integrator agents with directed cycle sensing topology. In a 2‐dimensional space, a necessary and sufficient condition for the set of desired bearing vectors to be feasible is derived. Then, we propose a bearing‐only control law for every agent and prove that the formation asymptotically converges to a formation specified by a set of feasible desired bearing vectors. Analysis of the equilibrium formations in the plane for a 3‐agent system and subsequent extension to an n‐agent system is provided. We further extend the analysis on directed triangular formation into a 3‐dimensional space. Finally, simulations validate the theoretical results.     

Time-varying formation control with attitude synchronization of multiple rigid body systems

In this article, we study the leader-following formation control problem for a group of rigid body systems whose followers' motions are described by dual quaternion equations. A few features are as follows. First, we introduce an exosystem to generate the leader's trajectory as well as the formation configuration, which can produce a large class of time-varying signals so that we can achieve a variety of time-varying formations. Second, to overcome the communication constraint described by a digraph, we extend the distributed observer to estimate not only the desired attitude and angular velocity but also the leader's position and linear velocity. Third, a novel distributed control law is synthesized to furnish a rigorous performance analysis of the closed-loop system. The effectiveness of our design is illustrated by a numerical example.     

Formation stabilization and resizing based on the control of inter‐agent distances

We propose a control strategy that could steer the group of mobile agents in the plane to achieve a specified formation. The control law could be implemented in a fully decentralized manner so that each agent moves on their own local reference frame. Under the acyclic minimally persistent graph topology, each agent measures the relative displacements of neighboring agents and then adjusts the distances between them to achieve the desired formation. As well as achieving a fixed formation, we could resize the formation only by changing the leader edge, which connects the leader with the first‐follower in acyclic minimally persistent graph, without changing the structures of the control law. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Supervised coverage control of multi-agent systems

In this paper, we consider a dynamic coverage problem for multi-agent systems, where the main objective of a group of mobile agents is to explore a given compact region. We propose a novel control scheme, where we introduce a supervisor that assists a group of agents with the centralized coverage control law and the global trajectory tracking control law. The coverage control law ensures the coverage task is done until the agents end up in local minima, and when they do, the global trajectory tracking control law ensures that the agents are deployed to uncovered regions. Our control scheme is designed to be decoupled such that only one control law is active at a given time. In addition to the coverage objective, we design control laws for coverage agents to avoid collisions and maintain proximity to a supervisor. Moreover, we utilize feedback linearization to use the proposed control scheme for coverage control of kinematic unicycle agents. We validate our approach via numerical simulations.     

On iterative learning algorithms for the formation control of nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper deals with formation control problems for multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics and switching network topologies. Using the nearest neighbor knowledge, a distributed algorithm is constructed by employing the iterative learning control approach. Sufficient conditions are given to obtain the desired relative formations of agents, which benefits from the strict positiveness of products of stochastic matrices. It is shown that the derived results can effectively work, although the network topologies dynamically change along both time and iteration axes and the corresponding directed graphs may not have spanning trees. Such result is also illustrated via numerical simulations.     

A distributed model predictive control (MPC) fault reconfiguration strategy for formation flying satellites

In this paper, an active distributed (also referred to as semi-decentralised) fault recovery control scheme is proposed that employs inaccurate and unreliable fault information into a model-predictive-control-based design. The objective is to compensate for the identified actuator faults that are subject to uncertainties and detection time delays, in the attitude control subsystems of formation flying satellites. The proposed distributed fault recovery scheme is developed through a two-level hierarchical framework. In the first level, or the agent level, the fault is recovered locally to maintain as much as possible the design specifications, feasibility, and tracking performance of all the agents. In the second level, or the formation level, the recovery is carried out by enhancing the entire team performance. The fault recovery performance of our proposed distributed (semi-decentralised) scheme is compared with two other alternative schemes, namely the centralised and the decentralised fault recovery schemes. It is shown that the distributed (semi-decentralised) fault recovery scheme satisfies the recovery design specifications and also imposes lower fault compensation control effort cost and communication bandwidth requirements as compared to the centralised scheme. Our proposed distributed (semi-decentralised) scheme also outperforms the achievable performance capabilities of the decentralised scheme. Simulation results corresponding to a network of four precision formation flight satellites are also provided to demonstrate and illustrate the advantages of our proposed distributed (semi-decentralised) fault recovery strategy.     

A distributed motion coordination strategy for multiple nonholonomic mobile robots in cooperative hunting operations

This paper presents a distributed smooth time-varying feedback control law for coordinating motions of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots of the Hilare-type to capture/enclose a target by making troop formations. This motion coordination is a cooperative behavior for security against invaders in surveillance areas. Each robot in this control law has its own coordinate system and it senses a target/invader, other robots and obstacles, to achieve this cooperative behavior without making any collision. Each robot especially has a two-dimensional control input referred to as a “formation vector” and the formation is controllable by the vectors. The validity of this control law is supported by computer simulations.     

Maneuvering Angle Rigid Formations With Global Convergence Guarantees

Angle rigid multi-agent formations can simultaneously undergo translational, rotational, and scaling maneuvering,therefore combining the maneuvering capabilities of both distance and bearing rigid formations. However, maneuvering angle rigid formations in 2D or 3D with global convergence guarantees is shown to be a challenging problem in the existing literature even when relative position measurements are available. Motivated by angle-induced linear equations in 2D triangles and 3D tetrahedra,th...     

Finite-time formation control for multi-agent systems

In this paper, we develop a new finite-time formation control framework for multi-agent systems with a large population of members. In this framework, we divide the formation information into two independent parts, namely, the global information and the local information. The global formation information decides the geometric pattern of the desired formation. Furthermore, it is assumed that only a small number of agents, which are responsible for the navigation of the whole team, can obtain the global formation information, and the other agents regulate their positions by the local information in a distributed manner. This approach can greatly reduce the data exchange and can easily realize various kinds of complex formations. As a theoretical preparation, we first propose a class of nonlinear consensus protocols, which ensures that the related states of all agents will reach an agreement in a finite time under suitable conditions. And then we apply these consensus protocols to the formation control, including time-invariant formation, time-varying formation and trajectory tracking, respectively. It is shown that all agents will maintain the expected formation in a finite time. Finally, several simulations are worked out to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results.