Formation control of non-identical multi-agent systems

The problem considered in this work is formation control for non-identical linear multi-agent systems (MASs) under a time-varying communication network. The size of the formation is scalable via a scaling factor determined by a leader agent. Past works on scalable formation are limited to identical agents under a fixed communication network. In addition, the formation scaling variable is updated under a leader-follower network. Differently, this work considers a leaderless undirected network in addition to a leader-follower network to update the formation scaling variable. The control law to achieve scalable formation is based on the internal model principle and consensus algorithm. A biased reference output, updated in a distributed manner, is introduced such that each agent tracks a different reference output. Numerical examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method