Distance-Based Adaptive Formation Control with Guaranteed Collision Avoidance and Connectivity Maintenance

In this article, a distance-based adaptive formation control scheme is proposed for a group of agents with external disturbances and unknown parameters. Different from the existing results, global stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed even if the desired formation framework is nonminimally or noninfinitesimally rigid. A distance bound selection method is presented to transform the problem of avoiding ambiguous formation shapes, collision, and connectivity interruption to a constrained control problem. A prescribed performance bound technique is utilized to restrict the distances into the preset ranges, and an adaptive law is designed for each agent to estimate the unknown parameters. It is shown that the proposed scheme can ensure the boundedness of all the closed-loop system signals, and the distance constraints are not violated. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.