Search

The circle formation problem for a group of mobile agents with limited interaction range is addressed in this paper. Distributed switching control laws are developed for multiagent systems to form prescribed formations from any initial configurations on a circle. It is shown that the desired circle formation can be achieved if a parameter depending on the agents’ interaction range is larger than the prescribed angular distance from each agent to its immediate counterclockwise agent. When the agents’ interaction range is not sufficiently large, the formation error of each agent converges to a limit, and an upper bound and a lower bound on the limit value are provided. It is also shown that under the proposed control laws, the mobile agents’ spatial order on the circle is always preserved and thus collision between mobile agents is avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A constructive method is presented to design bounded cooperative controllers that force a group of N mobile agents with limited sensing ranges to stabilize at a desired location, and guarantee no collisions between the agents. The control development is based on new general potential functions, which attain the minimum value when the desired formation is achieved, and are equal to infinity when a collision occurs. A p-times differential bump function is introduced and embedded into the potential functions to deal with the agent limited sensing ranges. An alternative to Barbalat's lemma is developed to analyze stability of the closed loop system. Extension to formation tracking is also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]