Control and Information Architectures for Formations

This paper reviews a number of concepts and results relevant to the design of architectures to maintain the shape of a formation of autonomous agents. The paper begins with motivating examples from nature and the manmade world, and emphasises the task of providing satisfactory sensing, communication and control architectures within a formation of autonomous agents. Then some technical tools for characterising and designing architectures are described, largely resting on graph theoretic considerations.