Flocking Control In Target Pursuit For Multi-agent Systems Based On Topology Connectivity

With the development of sensor and communication technologies, multi-agentsystems have been widely used in many areas and received a great attention from scholars.Flocking has become an important issue of cooperative control for multi-agent systemsdue to its distributed coordination. Communication topology connectivity has essentialinfluence upon the interactions among agents. As a consequence, this paper analyses therelationship between controllability of multi-agent systems and their communicationtopology connectivity, and further investigates the flocking control of target pursuit formulti-agent systems.Firstly, this paper investigates the relationship between controllability andcommunication topology connectivity for multi-agents systems with multiple leaders andswitching topologies. In this case, the concept of union graph is introduced to reveal therelationship between controllability of multi-agent systems with switching topologies andcontrollability of the corresponding systems with union graph. A necessary and sufficientcondition for structural controllability of the switching multi-agent systems is presented.Moreover, a sufficient condition for controllability of multi-agent systems with switchingtopology is proposed.Secondly, flocking and obstacle avoidance control for multi-agent systems with targetpursuit is studied. Considering the physical sizes of agents and model limitation, two kindsof artificial potential are established based on the rules about flocking and obstacleavoidance. In addition, virtual target is viewed as leader and provides navigation feedbackfor every agent to guarantee the topology connectivity. Based on these control inputs, thispaper proposes a control algorithm for flocking in target pursuit for multi-agent systems.With this algorithm, the multi-agent systems that are constituted with agents of physicalsize can successfully complete the behaviors of target pursuit, flocking and obstacleavoidance.Finally, to overcome the defect of vast communication consumption of the abovealgorithm, flocking control of target pursuit based on topology optimization for multi-agent systems is studied. Based on the guarantee for communication topologyconnectivity, a distributed topology optimization scheme based on optimally rigid graph ispresented. This optimization scheme generates optimally rigid graph for each agent withits neighboring flockmates and selects partial agents as the informed units to reduce thecommunication complexity. In addition, this paper proposes a flocking algorithm to makethe mobile agents result in behaviors of flocking and target pursuit with less energyconsumption.