Formation Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Formation control is a classical problem and has been a prime topic of interest among the scientific community in the past few years. Although a vast amount of literature exists in this field, there are still many open questions that require an in-depth understanding and a new perspective. This thesis contributes towards exploring the wide dimensions of formation control and implementing a formation control scheme for a group of multi-agent systems. These systems are autonomous in nature and are represented by double integrated dynamics. It is assumed that the agents are connected in an undirected graph and use a leader-follower architecture to reach formation when the leading agent is given a velocity that is piecewise constant. A MATLAB code is written for the implementation of formation and the consensus-based control laws are verified. Understanding the effects on formation due to a fixed formation geometry is also observed and reported. Also, a link that describes the functional similarity between desired formation geometry and the Laplacian matrix has been observed. The use of Laplacian matrix in stability analysis of the formation is of special interest