Distributed Multiagent System for Time-Varying Quadratic Programming With Application to Target Encirclement of Multirobot System

In this article, an unified distributed multiagent system is proposed to minimize the time-varying quadratic function under the time-varying coupled equality constraint, which is further applied to target encirclement of the multirobot system. The time-varying quadratic programming problem under consideration is a generalized version of some found in the literature. The proposed unified distributed multiagent system is effective in both of the following cases of time-varying quadratic programming: one with the nonidentical time-invariant Hessian and constraint matrices, and the other with the identical time-varying Hessian and constraint matrices. The convergence of the time-varying states can be guaranteed if the graph of the communication network is connected and undirected, subject to certain mild conditions. Additionally, simulations show that the suggested approach is effective in resolving the target encirclement problem of the multirobot systems.