Formation Control of 6-DOF Euler-Lagrange Systems with Restricted Inter-Vehicle Communication

In this paper, we consider formation control of Euler-Lagrange systems with motion in six degrees of freedom (6-DOF). In particular, we consider the case where p independent vehicles are expected to satisfy a given, possibly time-varying, formation pattern and where the formation as a whole is expected to track a smooth reference trajectory. To this end, we propose decentralized control laws for each vehicle and show that the formation error dynamics is globally exponentially stable under closed-loop control. The interconnections between the vehicles in the formation are represented using an undirected graph and the independent control laws are designed to provide feedback from any adjacent vehicle