Distributed Control of Flexible Chained Multiagent Formations

This letter presents a novel distributed approach for the control of flexible multiagent formations. We propose a formulation based on affine formation control in which, instead of considering a single nominal configuration as in standard formulations, we consider multiple nominal configurations. This has the advantage of providing higher flexibility to adapt to different task conditions. In our approach, the agents are arranged in a chained structure; specifically, we group them in chained sets and propose a control law based on orthogonal projections defined for each of these sets. The resulting strategy is distributed, as it uses local interactions, and it can be implemented using position measurements expressed in the agents' local reference frames. We support the proposed approach via formal analysis and illustrate it with simulations.