Flocking of multi‐agent dynamical systems with intermittent nonlinear velocity measurements

Abstract

SUMMARY In this paper, the problem of flocking control in networks of multiple dynamical agents with intermittent nonlinear velocity measurements is studied. A new flocking algorithm is proposed to guarantee the states of the velocity variables of all the dynamical agents to converge to consensus while ensuring collision avoidance of the whole group, where each agent is assumed to obtain some nonlinear measurements of the relative velocity between itself and its neighbors only on a sequence of non‐overlapping time intervals. The results are then extended to the scenario of flocking with a nonlinearly dynamical virtual leader, where only a small fraction of agents are informed and each informed agent can obtain intermittent nonlinear measurements of the relative velocity between itself and the virtual leader. Theoretical analysis shows that the achieved flocking in systems with or without a virtual leader is robust against the time spans of the agent speed‐sensors. Finally, some numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the new design. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Finite‐Time Optimal Formation Control for Second‐Order Multiagent Systems

“…The remaining formation problem is to design u that minimizes the cost function (21) subject to the system (20) with the initial and terminal conditions: Once again, using the knowledge of optimal control theory, the control law is obtained: Since the proof is similar to Theorem 1, the detailed derivation process is omitted for simplicity. When the specified formation is obtained at the given terminal time tf, the switching control law (17) can be used in the formation problem.…”

A novel alignment repulsion algorithm for flocking of multi-agent systems based on the number of neighbours per agent

“…Later, in Zhang, Chen, Stan, Zhou, and Maciejowski (2008) and Zhang, Chen, and Zhou (2009), the role of predictive mechanisms is used to reduce the communication cost and improve consensus in the forming and evolving of flocks/swarms using both numerical simulations and mathematical analyses. Recently, more breakthroughs on Reynolds flocking model have been achieved including a discussion of flocking in case of speed sensor failure in Wen, Duan, Li, and Chen (2012) and flocking control problem of multi-agent systems with connectivity preserving mechanism in another work by Wen, Duan, Su, Chen, and Yu (2012) and the model predictive control flocking of a networked multi-agent system is proposed based on position measurements in Zhan and Li (2013). The group's global connectivity in all aforementioned researches relies on an agent's cohesion ability but in some cases, the agents just obey the repulsion and alignment rules.…”

Second-order leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics and time delay via periodically intermittent pinning control

“…References [13] and [14] considered the influence of time delays and investigated the second-order consensus of multi-agent systems via Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method on general fixed directed topology and jointly-connected topologies, respectively. In [15], the authors introduced a novel algorithm to investigate the flocking of multi-agent systems with intermittent nonlinear velocity measurements, while [16] researched the second-order consensus of multi-agent system with directed topology and intermittent feedback control. In this paper, we will extend the results in [16] to the dynamical networks with nonlinear dynamics and time delay.…”