92 research outputs found
Certifying non-existence of undesired locally stable equilibria in formation shape control problems
A fundamental control problem for autonomous vehicle formations is formation
shape control, in which the agents must maintain a prescribed formation shape
using only information measured or communicated from neighboring agents. While
a large and growing literature has recently emerged on distance-based formation
shape control, global stability properties remain a significant open problem.
Even in four-agent formations, the basic question of whether or not there can
exist locally stable incorrect equilibrium shapes remains open. This paper
shows how this question can be answered for any size formation in principle
using semidefinite programming techniques for semialgebraic problems, involving
solutions sets of polynomial equations, inequations, and inequalities.Comment: 6 pages; to appear in the 2013 IEEE Multiconference on Systems and
Contro
Robust Distance-Based Formation Control of Multiple Rigid Bodies with Orientation Alignment
This paper addresses the problem of distance- and orientation-based formation
control of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in 3D space,
under static and undirected communication topologies. More specifically, we
design a decentralized model-free control protocol in the sense that each agent
uses only local information from its neighbors to calculate its own control
signal, without incorporating any knowledge of the model nonlinearities and
exogenous disturbances. Moreover, the transient and steady state response is
solely determined by certain designer-specified performance functions and is
fully decoupled by the agents' dynamic model, the control gain selection, the
underlying graph topology as well as the initial conditions. Additionally, by
introducing certain inter-agent distance constraints, we guarantee collision
avoidance and connectivity maintenance between neighboring agents. Finally,
simulation results verify the performance of the proposed controllers.Comment: IFAC Word Congress 201
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