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Distance-based acyclic minimally persistent formations with non-steepest descent control

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a control law to maneuver a group of mobile autonomous agents in the plane, where the information architecture among the agents is modeled by a directed graph. The objective is to achieve a prescribed formation shape by adjusting the inter-agent distances only, which is called the distance-based formation control. The proposed control law uses only relative position measurements so that each agent achieves its control objective in a decentralized manner. On the basis of the proposed control law, we analyze the convergence property of squared-distance errors. We first study a triangular formation and then extend the results of to acyclic minimally persistent formations having more than three agents. We also examine the formation including a moving leader. Numerical simulations and experiments with mobile robot platform are included.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechatronics, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), 123 Cheomdangwagi-ro(Oryong-dong), Buk-gu, Gwangju, 61005, Korea

    Myoung-Chul Park & Hyo-Sung Ahn

Authors
  1. Myoung-Chul Park
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  2. Hyo-Sung Ahn
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Correspondence to Hyo-Sung Ahn.

Additional information

Recommended by Guest Editors PooGyeon Park and Ju H. Park. This research is supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism(MCST) and Korea Creative Content Agency(KOCCA) in the Culture Technology(CT) Research & Development Program. The authors appreciate the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Myoung-Chul Park received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering from Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea, in 2011, and the M.S. degree in information and mechatronics from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, Korea, in 2013. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in mechatronics at GIST. His research interests include decentralized control of multi-agent systems and localization of sensor networks.

Hyo-Sung Ahn 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, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, Korea. He is currently Associate Professor and Dasan Professor. 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, learning control, network localization, and autonomous navigation systems.

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Park, MC., Ahn, HS. Distance-based acyclic minimally persistent formations with non-steepest descent control. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 14, 163–173 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-015-2004-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-015-2004-9

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