Time-varying formation tracking for general linear multi-agent systems with multiple leaders and input saturation

摘要

This paper studies the time-varying formation tracking problem for general linear multi-agent systems, in which there exist multiple leaders and the control input of each agent is bounded. Followers are classified into well-informed ones and uninformed ones in order to determine the unique convex combination of states of leaders as the formation reference. Time-varying formation of followers is predefined by a continuous differential offset vector with respect to the formation reference. A distributed formation tracking protocol is constructed using neighboring information and a low-gain feedback method is adopted to deal with input saturation. Sufficient conditions for the multi-agent system to achieve time-varying formation tracking are derived as well as the formation feasibility constraint. A bisection method is further proposed to determine the feasible low gain parameter without using global information. Finally, a numerical example is presented to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.