Distributed multiagent formation control with enhanced scalability

A one step ahead optimization based control of autonomous agents that modifies our earlier work, to enhance network scalability is proposed. As in our earlier work, each agent is modeled as a double integrator. The goal is to force the agents to converge to a formation specified by their desired relative positions, and moving with constant velocity. The earlier work had the property that in face of the arrival of a new agent the control laws of only the agents this new arrival attached it self to needed to be adjusted. However, this required that the largest possible network that may result be anticipated a priori, causing potentially sluggish responses when in a given epoch the network is much smaller than the largest anticipated size. In this paper we propose a new law that removes this difficulty.