Related papers: Undirected Rigid Formations are Problematic
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…
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…
Despite the great success of using gradient-based controllers to stabilize rigid formations of autonomous agents in the past years, surprising yet intriguing undesirable collective motions have been reported recently when inconsistent…
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…
This paper presents a novel control protocol for robust distance-based formation control with prescribed performance in which agents are subjected to unknown external disturbances. Connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance among…
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…
Formation control deals with the design of decentralized control laws that stabilize agents at prescribed distances from each other. We call any configuration that satisfies the inter-agent distance conditions a target configuration. It is…
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 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…
In formation control, triangular formations consisting of three autonomous agents serve as a class of benchmarks that can be used to test and compare the performances of different controllers. We present an algorithm that combines the…
Motivated by applications in intelligent highway systems, the paper studies the problem of guiding mobile agents in a one-dimensional formation to their desired relative positions. Only coarse information is used which is communicated from…
This paper treats the problem of the merging of formations, where the underlying model of a formation is graphical. We first analyze the rigidity and persistence of meta-formations, which are formations obtained by connecting several rigid…
This paper presents the analysis on the influence of distance mismatches on the standard gradient-based rigid formation control for second-order agents. It is shown that, similar to the first-order case as recently discussed in the…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper, we take a first step towards generalizing a recently proposed method for dealing with the problem of convergence to incorrect equilibrium points of distance-based formation controllers. Specifically, we introduce a distance…
Recently it has been reported that biased range-measurements among neighboring agents in the gradient distance-based formation control can lead to predictable collective motion. In this paper we take advantage of this effect and by…
We study the problem of distance-based formation control in autonomous multi-agent systems in which only distance measurements are available. This means that the target formations as well as the sensed variables are both determined by…
In this paper, we propose a distance-based formation control strategy that can enable four mobile agents, which are modelled by a group of single-integrators, to achieve the desired formation shape specified by using six consistent…