This paper reviews some main results and progress in distributed multi-agent coordination, focusing on papers published in major control systems and robotics journals since 2006. Distributed coordination of multiple vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, and unmanned underwater vehicles, has been a very active research subject studied extensively by the systems and control community. The recent results in this area are categorized into several directions, such as consensus, formation control, optimization, and estimation. After the review, a short discussion section is included to summarize the existing research and to propose several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for further investigations.

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An Overview of Recent Progress in the Study of Distributed Multi-Agent Coordination

This article reviews some main results and progress in distributed multi-agent coordination, focusing on papers published in major control systems and robotics journals since 2006. Distributed coordination of multiple vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles, has been a very active research subject studied extensively by the systems and control community. The recent results in this area are categorized into several directions, such as consensus, formation control, optimization, task assignment, and estimation. After the review, a short discussion section is included to summarize the existing research and to propose several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for further investigations.

An Overview of Recent Progress in the Study of Distributed Multi-agent Coordination

Formation control analysis and design problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are investigated. To achieve predefined time-varying formations, formation protocols are presented for UAV swarm systems first, where the velocities of UAVs can be different when achieving formations. Then, consensus-based approaches are applied to deal with the time-varying formation control problems for UAV swarm systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are proposed. An explicit expression of the time-varying formation center function is derived. In addition, a procedure to design the protocol for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations is given. Finally, a quadrotor formation platform, which consists of five quadrotors is introduced. Theoretical results obtained in this brief are validated on the quardrotor formation platform, and outdoor experimental results are presented.

Time-Varying Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Theories and Applications

This note investigates the finite-time attitude control problems for a single spacecraft and multiple spacecraft. First of all, a finite-time controller is designed to solve finite-time attitude tracking problem for a single spacecraft. Rigorous proof shows that the desired attitude can be tracked in finite time in the absence of disturbances. In the presence of disturbances, the tracking errors can reach a region around the origin in finite time. Then, based on the neighbor rule, a distributed finite-time attitude control law is proposed for a group of spacecraft with a leader-follower architecture. Under the finite-time control law, the attitude synchronization can be achieved in finite time.

Finite-Time Attitude Tracking Control of Spacecraft With Application to Attitude Synchronization

Time-varying formation tracking analysis and design problems for second-order Multi-Agent systems with switching interaction topologies are studied, where the states of the followers form a predefined time-varying formation while tracking the state of the leader. A formation tracking protocol is constructed based on the relative information of the neighboring agents. Necessary and sufficient conditions for Multi-Agent systems with switching interaction topologies to achieve time-varying formation tracking are proposed together with the formation tracking feasibility constraint based on the graph theory. An approach to design the formation tracking protocol is proposed by solving an algebraic Riccati equation, and the stability of the proposed approach is proved using the common Lyapunov stability theory. The obtained results are applied to solve the target enclosing problem of a multiquadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system consisting of one leader (target) quadrotor UAV and three follower quadrotor UAVs. A numerical simulation and an outdoor experiment are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

Time-Varying Formation Tracking for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems Subjected to Switching Topologies With Application to Quadrotor Formation Flying

We consider the coordinated attitude control problem for a group of spacecraft, without velocity measurements. Our approach is based on the introduction of auxiliary dynamical systems (playing the role of velocity observers in a certain sense) to generate the individual and relative damping terms in the absence of the actual angular velocities and relative angular velocities. Our main focus, in this technical note, is to address the following two problems: 1) Design a velocity-free attitude tracking and synchronization control scheme, that allows the team members to align their attitudes and track a time-varying reference trajectory (simultaneously). 2) Design a velocity-free synchronization control scheme, in the case where no reference attitude is specified, and all spacecraft are required to reach a consensus by aligning their attitudes with the same final time-varying attitude. In this work, one important and novel feature (besides the non-requirement of the angular velocity measurements), consists in the fact that the control torques are naturally bounded and the designer can arbitrarily assign the desired bounds on the control torques, a priori, through the control gains, regardless of the angular velocities. Throughout this technical note, the communication flow between spacecraft is assumed to be undirected. Simulation results of a scenario of four spacecraft are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.

Attitude Synchronization of a Group of Spacecraft Without Velocity Measurements

Formation control of VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with communication delays

On consensus algorithms for double-integrator dynamics without velocity measurements and with input constraints ✩

Brief paper: Global trajectory tracking control of VTOL-UAVs without linear velocity measurements

http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~tayebi/Automatica2013-1.pdf

Abdelkader Abdessameud

Papers

Attitude Synchronization of a Group of Spacecraft Without Velocity Measurements

Formation control of VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with communication delays

On consensus algorithms for double-integrator dynamics without velocity measurements and with input constraints ✩

Brief paper: Global trajectory tracking control of VTOL-UAVs without linear velocity measurements

On consensus algorithms design for double integrator dynamics