Bounded control of network connectivity in multi-agent systems

A distributed control law that guarantees connectivity maintenance in a network of multiple mobile agents is presented. The control law, which lets the agents perform formation manoeuvres, respects sensor limitations by allowing each agent to only take into account agents within its sensing radius. In contrast to previous approaches to the problem, the proposed control law does not attain infinite values whenever an edge of the communication graph tends to be lost. This is achieved via the use of decentralised navigation functions, which are bounded potential fields. The navigation functions are defined to take into account the connectivity maintenance objective. The authors first treat the case of connectivity maintenance for a static communication graph and then extend the result to the case of dynamic graphs. The results are illustrated on a formation control problem.