Related papers: Rigidity and persistence for ensuring shape mainte…
In this paper, we study the construction and transformation of two-dimensional persistent graphs. Persistence is a generalization to directed graphs of the undirected notion of rigidity. In the context of moving autonomous agent formations,…
By an undirected rigid formation of mobile autonomous agents is meant a formation based on graph rigidity in which each pair of "neighboring" agents is responsible for maintaining a prescribed target distance between them. In a recent paper…
We show in this paper that a small subset of agents of a formation of n agents in Euclidean space can control the position and orientation of the entire formation. We consider here formations tasked with maintaining inter-agent distances at…
This paper introduces the notion of weak rigidity to characterize a framework by pairwise inner products of inter-agent displacements. Compared to distance-based rigidity, weak rigidity requires fewer constrained edges in the graph to…
Formation control deals with the design of decentralized control laws that stabilize mobile, autonomous agents at prescribed distances from each other. We call any configuration of the agents a target configuration if it satisfies the…
In this paper, we develop new methods for the analysis of decentralized control systems and we apply them to formation control problems. The basic set-up consists of a system with multiple agents corresponding to the nodes of a graph whose…
This paper investigates the stability of distance-based \textit{flexible} undirected formations in the plane. Without rigidity, there exists a set of connected shapes for given distance constraints, which is called the ambit. We show that a…
This paper presents an angle-based approach for distributed formation shape stabilization of multi-agent systems in the plane. We develop an angle rigidity theory to study whether a planar framework can be determined by angles between…
Most rigid formation controllers reported in the literature aim to only stabilize a rigid formation shape, while the formation orientation is not controlled. This paper studies the problem of controlling rigid formations with prescribed…
In this paper, the recent developments on distributed coordination control, especially the consensus and formation control, are summarized with the graph theory playing a central role, in order to present a cohesive overview of the…
This paper is concerned with a formation shaping problem for point agents in a two-dimensional space, where control avoids the possibility of reflection ambiguities. One solution for this type of problems was given first for three or four…
Rigidity of the interaction graph is a fundamental condition for achieving the desired formation which can be defined in terms of distance or bearing constraints between agents. In this paper, for reaching a unique formation with the same…
Unlike the case with identical neighboring agents whose actions are mirrored, the problem of distributed formation control design with heterogeneous sensing is not straightforward. In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed…
This paper studies the problem of stabilizing target formations specified by inter-neighbor bearings with relative position measurements. While the undirected case has been studied in the existing works, this paper focuses on the case where…
This paper addresses the problem of position- and orientation-based formation control of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in a $3$D workspace with obstacles. More specifically, we design a decentralized control protocol…
This paper considers a novel problem of how to choose an appropriate geometry for a group of agents with only shape constraints but with a flexible scale. Instead of assigning the formation system with a specific geometry, here the only…
It is well established that dilute active dopants can melt an arrested amorphous solid by enhancing cage breaking and accelerating structural relaxation. Yet it remains unclear whether increasing persistence simply amplifies this effective…
This article deals with the consensus problem involving agents with time-varying singularities in the dynamics or communication in undirected graph networks. Existing results provide control laws which guarantee asymptotic consensus. These…
This paper presents thorough mathematical modeling, control law development, and simulation of virtual structure formations which are inspired by the characteristics of rigid bodies. The stable constraint forces that establish the rigidity…
In this paper, we study the emergence of circular formation for agents in cyclic pursuit. Each agent is a unicycle traveling at a fixed common forward speed. We first establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of…