A Passivity-Based Approach to Group Coordination in Multi-agent Networks

摘要

Surveillance and convoy tracking applications often require groups of networked agents for redundancy and better coverage. Important goals upon deployment include the establishment of a formation around a target and syn-chronization of the output (e.g., velocity). Although there exist distributed algo-rithms using only local communication that achieve these goals, they typically ignore destabilizing effects resulting from implementation uncertainties, such as network delays and data loss. This paper resolves these issues by introducing a discrete-time distributed design framework that uses a compositional, passivity-based approach to ensure /^-stability regardless of overlay network topology, in the presence of network delays and data loss. For the restricted case of a reg-ular overlay network topology, this work shows that asymptotic formation es-tablishment and output synchronization can be achieved. Finally, simulations of velocity-limited quadrotor unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are presented to show the performance in the presence of time-varying network delays and varying amounts of data loss.