A New Approach of Formation Control for Multi-Agent Systems With Environmental Changes

In this paper, a two-stage reconfiguration strategy is proposed for a group of agents to find their specially designated formation, which can be seen as a transition from the current states to the predefined formations. The specially designated formation occurs during the inter-task idle time in order to minimize the reconfiguration time. The basic specially designated formation is designed for dotted agents based on the optimal mapping relationships and current probabilities of the predefined formations. Then, the reconfiguration schemes are developed with the agents modeled as circles or ellipses to account for their physical shapes, and the problem of agent overlapping during the formation is addressed. Examples and simulation results are presented to analyze and demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of the new design techniques.