Convexity-preserving formation control of multi-agent systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is such a system which composed of many autonomous agents with mutual interactions among them. Over the past few years, formation control of MAS has obtained intensive focus due to its widely application in robotics, astronautics, and aeronautics etc.. However, many existing works on formation control of MAS concentrate on the dynamics of an MAS only, there is few works concerns about the geometric configuration of an MAS. In this contribution, by combining some techniques of computational geometry and control theory, a novel control strategy is proposed to preserve the convexity of the configuration of an MAS. Moreover, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.