LPV formation control for a class of non-holonomic agents with directed and switching communication topologies

A distributed controller design is presented for a set of agents with non-holonomic dynamics that communicate through a directed and switching topology. The design is carried out in the framework of LPV-LFT control. The objective is to only use relative (local) information to reach formation consensus in Cartesian coordinates, while the agents move along a desired path. An analysis shows that a moving formation of agents achieve orientation consensus naturally. A novel methodology from the literature is employed to solve the problem, where feasibility of a small set of LMIs provides guarantees of stability, performance and robustness. Simulation results of a leader-follower example illustrate and confirm the applicability of the approach.