Formation control for multiple autonomous agents based on virtual leader structure

This paper considers the formation control problem for multiple autonomous agents system based on virtual leader structure. The reference output vectors are supposed to be generated by an exosystem which is estimated by using the virtual leader structure. By introducing some concatenation vectors, the single autonomous agent system is transformed into a global multi-agent system and the system quadratic performance index is also transformed into a relevant format. According to the maximum principle, the formation control problem is transformed into solve a two-point boundary value problem. The obtained formation control law consists of analytic output feedback terms which are constructed by the solution of a Riccati matrix equation and a Sylvester matrix equation and a compensation term. The effectiveness and feasibility of the formation control law is demonstrated by a numerical example.