Robust Distance-Based Formation Control of Multiple Rigid Bodies with Orientation Alignment

This paper addresses the problem of distance- and orientation-based formationcontrol of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in 3D space, under static andundirected communication topologies. More specifically, we design a decentralized model-freecontrol protocol in the sense that each agent uses only local information from its neighbors to calculate its own control signal, without incorporating any knowledge of the model nonlinearities and exogenous disturbances. Moreover, the transient and steady state response is solely determined by certain designer-specified performance functions and is fully decoupled by the agents’ dynamic model, the control gain selection, the underlying graph topology as well asthe initial conditions. Additionally, by introducing certain inter-agent distance constraints, we guarantee collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance between neighboring agents. Finally, simulation results verify the performance of the proposed controllers.QC 20170811