Emerging Applications of Control and Systems Theory

In this chapter, we consider coordination control of a group of UAV agents with constant and in general nonidentical speeds. The control input is designed to steer their orientations and the control objective is to achieve a desired formation configuration for all the agents subject to constant-speed constraints. Through a formation feasibility analysis by a three-agent example, we show that it is generally impossible to control and maintain a formation by constant-speed agents if target formation shapes are defined by agents’ actual positions. We then adopt a circular motion center as a virtual position for each agent to define the target formation shape. Two different formation design approaches, namely, a displacement-based approach and a distance-based approach, are discussed in detail to coordinate a group of constant-speed agents in achieving a target formation with stable circular motions via limited interactions. G. S. Seyboth is now with Robert Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH. Text and figures of this chapter were reproduced from Z. Sun and B.D.O. Anderson, Formation feasibility on coordination control of networked heterogeneous systems with drift terms, IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), IEEE, 2016, 3462–3467. https://doi.org/10. 1109/CDC.2016.7798788. B. D. O. Anderson · Z. Sun (B) · C. Yu Research School of Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia e-mail: [email protected] B. D. O. Anderson e-mail: [email protected] C. Yu e-mail: [email protected] B. D. O. Anderson · C. Yu School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China G. S. Seyboth Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 9, 70550 Stuttgart, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 R. Tempo et al. (eds.), Emerging Applications of Control and Systems Theory, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences Proceedings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67068-3_2 15 16 B. D. O. Anderson et al.