An overview of distributed high-order multi-agent coordination

Research on multi-agent systems has attracted much attention in the past two decades, and numerous results have been obtained. Its widespread applications include spacecraft, mobile robots, sensor networks, etc. Most previous research works on multi-agent systems studied the first- and second-order dynamics. However, in engineering, many systems are modeled by higher-order dynamics. This paper reviews the major results and progress in distributed high-order multi-agent coordination. After the review, a short discussion section is included to summarize the existing research and propose several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for further investigations.