Formation control on Jordan curves based on noisy proximity measurements

The paradigmatic formation control problem of steering a multi-agent system towards a balanced circular formation has been the subject of extensive studies in the control engineering community. Indeed, this is due to the fact that it shares several features with relevant applications such as distributed environmental monitoring or fence-patrolling. However, these applications may also present some relevant differences from the ideal setting such as the curve on which the formation must be achieved not being a circle, or the measurements being neither ideal nor as a continuous information flow. In this work, we attempt to fill this gap between theory and applications by considering the problem of steering a multi-agent system towards a balanced formation on a generic closed curve and under very restrictive assumptions on the information flow amongst the agents. We tackle this problem through an estimation and control strategy that borrows tools from interval analysis to guarantee the robustness that is required in the considered scenario

A Cyclic Pursuit Framework for Networked Mobile Agents Based on Vector Field Approach

This paper proposes a pursuit formation control scheme for a network of double-integrator mobile agents based on a vector field approach. In a leaderless architecture, each agent pursues another one via a cyclic topology to achieve a regular polygon formation. On the other hand, the agents are exposed to a rotational vector field such that they rotate around the vector field centroid, while they keep the regular polygon formation. The main problem of existing approaches in the literature for cyclic pursuit of double-integrator multiagent systems is that under those approaches, the swarm angular velocity and centroid are not controllable based on missions and agents capabilities. However, by employing the proposed vector field approach in this paper, while keeping a regular polygon formation, the swarm angular velocity and centroid can be determined arbitrary. The obtained results can be extended to achieve elliptical formations with cyclic pursuit as well. Simulation results for a team of eight mobile agents verify the accuracy of the proposed control scheme

Applications of collective circular motion control to multirobot systems

Collective circular motion is common in both natural systems and engineering applications. Recent theoretical research has intensively studied the fundamental control mechanism. This brief aims to pave the way from theoretical design to practical implementation by addressing a set of issues encountered in real applications. As a result, a practically effective control algorithm is successfully implemented and examined for a multirobot system to achieve a desired circular formation