Distributed targeted distance-based formation control for mechanical systems

This paper studies the problem of distributed targeted distance-based formation control for mechanical systems. The problem consists on finding a distributed control law such that if each agent targets a convex set, and also measures the relative position of their nearest neighbors, then the agents achieve the desired formation in these sets while its velocities are driven to zero. We study the problem for agents with a time-delay communication in the measurements of the relative positions and where the motion of each agent is determined by a Lagrangian function. Simulation are given to validate the theoretical result.