Research On Consensus For Multi-agent Systems And Formation Control For Multiple Robots

Currently,multi-agent systems and its cooperative control have extensive applications in the following fields,such as target search,traffic control,cooperative transport,cooperative surveillance,optimal resource allocation in networks and so on.They have become a hot topic in the control filed.Consensus is the basis and core of cooperative control for multi-agent systems.To accelerate the consensus convergence speed,consensus algorithms are designed,and then,be applied to multi-robot formation control.The main contents are as follows:Firstly,for continuous-time multi-agent systems,a continuous-time consensus algorithm is proposed,it employs first-and second-order neighbors’ both current states and outdated states.The stability and convergence of the proposed algorithm are analyzed theoretically.It is shown that the proposed continuous-time consensus algorithm converges faster than the standard continuous-time one with the information of second-order neighbors,if the outdated states are chosen properly.The proposed continuous-time consensus algorithm is extended to guarantee relative deviations in the information states converge to desired values.Simulation examples were provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Secondly,for discrete-time multi-agent systems,a discrete-time consensus algorithm is proposed by extending the proposed continuous-time consensus algorithm,it uses first-and second-order neighbors’ both current states and outdated states.The stability and convergence of the proposed algorithm are analyzed theoretically.For any outdated states,it is shown that the proposed discrete-time consensus algorithm converges faster than the standard discrete-time one with the information of second-order neighbors,if the sampling period is chosen properly.The proposed discrete-time consensus algorithm is extended to guarantee relative deviations in the information states converge to desired values.Simulation examples verified the effectiveness of the proposed discrete-time consensus algorithm.Finally,the proposed consensus algorithm is applied to multi-robot formation control,in which,consensus-based formation control scheme is designed to implement two applications,axial alignment and triangle formation.These applications are implemented and validated in simulation,and on a multi-robot platform,respectively.Results show that the effectiveness of the proposed formation control scheme.