Formation Control

Mini Project
(AE 647)
Autonomous Navigation
Department of Aerospace Engineering

Figure 1 - A Bird formation flight clearly depicting the scalability of formation control

Submitted by:Gaurav Kejriwal (14101026)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Mangal Kothari for
his guidance, constant motivation and eagerness to be available for help
at any hour of the day.

Figure 2. Bridge formation by Army ants

Abstract
A distributed consensus controller on similar lines as per [15] has been
implemented to drive a team of four agents to form a circular formation
for a case of fixed rotational frames, without being dependent on Global
map information.

Introduction/Literature survey
UAVs and MAVs have recently attracted significant amount of
attraction due to their wide spread applications. Be it reconnaissance,
surveillance, mapping or rescue missions, UAVs are indeed proving to
be a versatile and cost-effective solution.
Many such applications like, continuous reconnaissance, dynamic
encirclement, Target neutralization, payload delivery etc. require
collaboration between different agents which in turn underscores the
importance of formation control. Nature is abundant with examples of
highly efficient formation control, as depicted in Figure 1 and 2 which
further highlights its importance .
A collaborated effort between different agents is much more
advantageous than conventional systems in terms of systems scalability,
robustness and overall efficiency [1], and is therefore the motivation of
the current work.
Existing formation control approaches can be broadly classified as
leader follower strategies and nearest neighbor approaches, [15]. In the
first one group agents specify their movement depending on a particular
agent assigned as a leader within the formation. In the latter one on the
other hand each agent specifies its movement based on the locally
available information from its neighbor agents. Many control
approaches have been put forward to solve the problems in formation

control, for example, leader-follower strategy [7], virtual structure

approach [8] and behavior-based method [2], [1].
Study of information flow is a critical part in understanding the
coordinated movements of different agents and thus a critical problem
for cooperative control and thus formation control is to design
appropriate distributed algorithms such that the group of vehicles can
reach consensus on the shared information in the presence of limited and
unreliable information exchange and dynamically changing interaction
topologies, [3], which is a consequence of vehicles continuously
changing their positions through course of time.
Therefore above presented challenges in communication and consensus
reaching along with control generation issues for different agents to
achieve a specific team objective using limited information pose
significant challenges and is therefore a current area of research. For the
same reason, much of the current research on cooperative control is done
with assumption of full information or is studied without its applications,
[3]. Distributed problem solving is the name applied to a subfield of
distributed artificial intelligence (AI) in which the emphasis is on getting
agents to work together well to solve problems that require collective
effort. Due to an inherent distribution of resources such as knowledge,
capability, information, and expertise among the agents, an agent in a
distributed problem-solving system is unable to accomplish its own tasks
alone, or at least can accomplish its tasks better (more quickly,
completely, precisely, or certainly) when working with others, [4].
Consensus algorithms are an integral part when it comes to formation
control problems and have recently been studied extensively in the
context of cooperative control of multiple autonomous vehicles [9, 10,
11].

The output-feedback consensus protocols are used to solve the weak

consensus of multi agent systems [13,14],[12], where the weak
consensus means the system can converge to a state that may vary with
time and even run to infinity in some cases. In contrast, the strong
consensus indicates that system can converge to a fixed state.

Notations and Problem setup

Fw = Fixed Reference frame
Fi = Frame of Agent 'i'
pi = Position of agent 'i' expressed in fixed frame.

i = Orientation of 'i' expressed in fixed frame.

cos( i ) -sin( i )
Ri
Rotation Matrix
sin( i ) cos( i )
T

vi = vxi v yi linear velocity in local x and y direction

.

w i = i = Angular velocity
.

Ri = Si Ri = Time derivative of Rotation matrix

0 -w i
where, Si =

w
0
i

The relative position between the agents is denoted by

T

Pij = x ij yij = R iT (Pj - Pi )

and
ij = j - i
Also R ij = R iT R j
The objectives of the agents will be to end up in desired
*

configurtion defined by Pij and ij , such that

*

Pij = Pik + R ik Pkj and

*

ij = ik + kj
(which represents the realizable configuration)for all i, j, k,
*

being from the N agents taken and R ik the rotation matrix

*

defined by the angle ik

Agents use a standard consensus controller

of the form:.

Vi ( x i )

P
jNi

ij

Pij*

The consequence os such a consensus controller

is that information state of ith agent is drien
towards the state of its neighbours and eentually
a consensus is reached.,[3]
The proof of convergence of above algorithm is given in [15].

Numbers of agents taken are four and are initially aligned as per fig.4,
with the aim of driving them to the desired concentric formation as
shown in fig.3, both configurations being in accordance with the
assumption of realizable configuration, [15], as follows:

Pij = Pik + R ik Pkj and

*

ij = ik + kj

A case of fixed rotational frames has been taken which satisfy the
following assumption:

Fixed desired orientations, which implies that initial orientations of

*

ij = ij for all i,j

agents is such that,

Also a connected undirected graph is assumed i.e. there exists a path

joining any two nodes in the graph
Network topology is as shown below:-

1
2

RESULTS

Fig.3 Desired configuration of Agents

Fig.4- Initial configuration of agents in accordance with realizable configuration

Fig.5- Final Configuration of Agents

Fig.6- Trajectory of agents in world frame.

Conclusions/Future Scope
In this project a distributed consensus controller that drives a team of
agents to reach a desired formation with specified relative positions and
orientations in the absence of a global reference frame is presented.
Present study has been done for a 2D case for fixed rotational frames
which can be extended to 3D and time varying rotational frames. Also
as the limitation of the requirement of Global information is waved off
with such a controller we can look into the possibilities of integrating the
same with vision based navigation to explore further higher efficiency
models.

References
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consideration
2. F. Zhang and N. E. Leonard. Cooperative filters and control for cooperative
exploration. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 55(3):650663,
March 2010.
3. Wei Ren and Randal W. Beard., Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle
Cooperative Control Theory and Applications.
4. Gerhard Weiss, Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed
Modern Approach to Artificial Intelligence, The MIT Press Cambridge,
Massachusetts London, England, 1999.

5. Cheng et. al., Decentralized formation control with connectivity

maintenance and collision avoidance under limited and intermittent sensing,
2014 American Control Conference (ACC) June 4-6, 2014. Portland,
Oregon, USA
6. Hafez et. al., Using Linear Model Predictive Control Via Feedback
Linearization for Dynamic Encirclement, 2014 American Control
Conference (ACC) June 4-6, 2014. Portland, Oregon, USA
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2009.
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