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Leader-follower type distance-based formation control of a group of autonomous agents

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Abstract

We study distance-based formation control of a group of mobile agents consisting of several leaders and the remaining followers. The leaders sense their own positions with respect to a global reference frame whereas the followers sense only relative positions of their neighbors with respect to their own local reference frames. The relative position sensing topology is given as a directed acyclic graph. The objective of the agents is to reach their desired positions in the global reference frame. By applying a distance-based control law to the followers, we allow the agents to reach their desired positions if the sensing graph satisfies some graph rigidity conditions. Further we study the case that the desired positions are time-varying.

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Correspondence to Kwang-Kyo Oh.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Nam H. Jo under the direction of Editor Euntai Kim. This work was conducted within the project “Free Piston Engine Linear Generator for CHP” (No. EO170024) at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH).

Kwang-Kyo Oh received the B.S. degree in mineral and petroleum engineering and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in mechatronics from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, Korea, in 2013. He is currently with Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, Gwangju, Korea. His research interests are in the areas of control theory and applications with emphasis on cooperative control of multi-agent systems.

Hyo-Sung Ahn is a Professor and Dasan Professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, Korea. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in astronomy from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Utah State University, Logan, in 2006. Since July 2007, he has been with the School of Mechatronics and School of Mechanical Engineering. Before joining GIST, he was a Senior Researcher with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea. He is the author of the research monograph Iterative Learning Control: Robustness and Monotonic Convergence for Interval Systems (Springer-Verlag, 2007). His research interests include distributed control, aerospace navigation and control, network localization, and learning control.

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Oh, KK., Ahn, HS. Leader-follower type distance-based formation control of a group of autonomous agents. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 15, 1738–1745 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0347-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0347-5

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