Heterogeneous swarm control based on two‐layer topology

Summary In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous swarm control method based on a two‐layer communication topology, which solves the problems of great difficulty in controller design and high computational complexity of communication topology in large‐scale heterogeneous swarm control. Firstly, we divide large‐scale heterogeneous swarms into several independent isomorphic sub‐swarm and design corresponding sub‐swarm controllers, which dramatically reduces the difficulty of swarm controller design. Secondly, we introduce a two‐layer communication topology to treat the followers in the first‐layer communication topology as leaders in the second‐layer communication topology, which establishes the connection between each sub‐swarm and the global leader and reduces the computational complexity of the communication topology. Finally, based on the two‐layer communication topology, the swarm controllers in the first‐layer and second‐layer communication topologies are designed using the sliding mode and dynamic surface methods. The Lyapunov function is designed to prove its stability. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the controllers.