Distributed game strategy design with application to multi-agent formation control

In this paper, we consider a multi-agent formation control problem from a game theory point of view. It is well known that a major difficulty in a communication network based formation control problem is that each agent is only able to exchange information with other agents according to the communication topology. This information constraint prevents many game strategy design approaches that require individual agents to have global information from being implemented in many cases. We formulate the formation control problem in such a way that individual agents try to minimize their locally measured formation errors and to solve it as a differential game problem. We consider two cases of non-cooperative and cooperative games and propose a novel distributed design approach that utilizes the relationship between the initial and terminal state variables. This approach is applied to an illustrative formation control example among three agents and the formation errors under various scenarios are compared and analyzed.