A cooperative formation control strategy maintaining connectivity of a multi-agent system

In this paper, we present a cooperative target-centric formation control strategy that maintains the dynamic graph connectivity for a system of unmanned aerial vehicles. The connectivity of a graph plays a critical role in dynamic networks of multiple agents since it represents a level of information sharing capability of a system. The connectivity of a network of unmanned systems changes as the state dependent graph evolves over time, revealing the risk of the system being uncontrollable during null connectivity. We show that the existing formation controller fails to make the formation when the network connectivity is lost. We propose a novel formation control strategy which keeps the multi-agent graph connected throughout the system dynamic process. The convergence of the formation controller is shown with the help of the Lyapunov theory. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.