Consensus for formation control of multi-agent systems

This study considers the formation problem for multi-agent systems, which are described by the second-order dynamics on nonlinear manifolds SE(2) and SE(3). In particular, the model of each agent contains information about its attitude. Using a consensus strategy, a control law is developed to guarantee that any desired formation can be achieved asymptotically under the conditions of complete or tree-shaped communication topologies. Numerical simulations are presented to verify the theoretical results. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.