Reach almost sure consensus with only group information

This brief presents a new distributed scheme to solve the consensus problem for a group of agents if neither their absolute states nor inter-agent relative states are available. The new scheme considers a random partition of agents into two subgroups at each step and then uses the relative group representative state as feedback information for the consensus purpose. It is then shown that almost sure consensus can be achieved under the proposed scheme in both discrete time and continuous time. For the discrete time case, almost sure consensus is achieved if and only if the weighting parameter for state update is greater than one. For the continuous time case, almost sure consensus is realized when the weighting parameter is positive. Moreover, it is shown that if a uniform probability is considered for group selection, then the group of agents can reach average consensus in mean.The work of Lin was supported by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of ChinaLR13F030002. The work of Yu was supported in part by the Australian Research Council through Discovery Project DP-130103610, a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship under Grant DP-110100538, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61375072), and the Open Research Project (No. ICT1427) of the State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, China

Leader-following Formation Control Based on Pursuit Strategies

Abstract-The paper studies formation control of multi-agent systems under a directed acyclic graph. In a directed acyclic graph, the agents without neighbors are leaders and the others are followers. Leaders move in a formation with a time-varying velocity and followers can access the relative positions of their neighbors and the leaders' velocity. A local formation control law is proposed in the paper based on pursuit strategies and necessary and sufficient conditions for stability and convergence are derived. Moreover, the results are extended to the case with arbitrary communication delays, for which the steady-state formation is presented according both the control parameters and time delays

A distributed reconfigurable control law for escorting and patrolling missions using teams of unicycles

Abstract—Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of vehicles for which adaptive cooperation and autonomous execution become a necessity. In the paper, we develop a distributed reconfigurable control law to distribute unicycle-type vehicles evenly on a circle surrounding a moving target for the escorting and patrolling missions. The even distribution of the vehicles provides the best overall coverage of the target in its surroundings. It is shown that as the target moves, the group formation moves and rotates around the target to keep the target around the formation centroid. When some vehicles in the group are lost due to faults, the remaining vehicles recognize the loss and adaptively reconfigure themselves to a new evenly distributed formation