Group Coordination when the Reference Velocity is Available Only to the Leader: An Adaptive Design

We study a coordination problem where the objective is to steer a group of agents to a prescribed formation that translates with a prescribed reference velocity. Unlike existing designs which assume that the the reference velocity information is available to each agent, we consider the situation where this information is available only to a leader. We then develop an adaptive design with which the other agents reconstruct the reference velocity and recover the desired formation. This design relies only on relative distance information with respect to neighboring agents and, thus, be implemented in a decentralized fashion.