Distributed adaptive control for time-varying formation of general linear multi-agent systems

An adaptive gain scheduling technique is investigated to discuss distributed time-varying formation (TVF) control problems for general linear time-invariant multi-agent systems (LTI-MASs), where two types of topologies are considered: (1) the interaction topology is undirected and connected, and (2) the interaction topology is directed. Two fully distributed adaptive TVF control protocols are, respectively proposed, which both assign a time-varying coupling weight to each node in the interaction topology. Two algorithms to design the constructed protocols are presented under the undirected and directed interaction topologies, respectively. A feasible TVF set is provided. The stabilities of two algorithms are, respectively proved based on the Lyapunov functional theory. For both undirected and directed interaction topologies, general LTI-MASs can achieve the given TVF using the designed fully distributed adaptive formation protocol without any global information about the interaction topology when the TVF satisfies the feasible set. Finally, theoretical results are illustrated with numerical simulation examples.