Formation control of multiple elliptic agents with limited sensing ranges

This paper presents a design of cooperative controllers that force a group of N mobile agents with an elliptic shape and limited sensing ranges to perform a desired formation and that guarantee no collisions between any agents in the group. The desired formation can be stabilized at feasible reference trajectories with bounded time derivatives. The formation control design is based on explicit algebraic separation conditions between ellipses, root conditions of cubic polynomials, the Lyapunov direct method, and smooth or p‐times differentiable step functions. These functions are incorporated into novel potential functions to solve the collision avoidance problem without the need for switchings despite the agents' limited sensing ranges. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society