A Flexible Formation Maneuver Control Strategy for Multi-agent Cooperative Transportation System

This paper deals with a distributed flexible affine-based control problem for multi-agent cooperative transportation systems (MACTSs) with multiple leaders in undirected graph. The difficulty of cooperative transportation is to maintain the object geometric size constraints in the process of tracking desired time-varying trajectories. To achieve this goal, we employ the combined controller concept, combine the affine formation with the consensus protocol to build up a novel distributed formation maneuver controller for linear MACTSs with first-order dynamics in leader-follower pattern. And we give a new mathematical derivation to analyze the feasibility of our method. Numerical simulations validate our method’s stability and efficiency in a shearing-and-rotating example scenario and we discuss the optimum parameters settings in this case.