LPV formation control of non-holonomic multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper studies a formation control problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems; specifically non-holonomic vehicles represented as linear parameter-varying (LPV) models are of interest here. The objective of this study is twofold. First, we demonstrate the applicability of a novel approach to distributed control for LPV decomposable systems (Hoffmann et al, 2013). Second, we investigate different LPV representations of non-holonomic vehicles. We consider a group of agents in a leader-follower configuration which communicate through a directed time-varying but diagonalizable interconnection topology, where follower vehicles must achieve a desired formation and track the path determined by the leader agent. In addition, the leader vehicle is equipped with an LPV flatness-based controller to track a reference trajectory. The problem is formulated in terms of linear fractional transformations (LFT) for LPV systems with the objective of minimizing the closed-loop induced C2 gain. Simulation results with a formation of non-holonomic discs illustrate the proposed approach.