Minimum-Energy Leader-Following Formation of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems with Communication Constraints

This paper concerns minimum-energy leader-following formation design and analysis problems of distributed multi-agent systems (DMASs) subjected to randomly switching topologies and aperiodic communication pauses. The critical feature of this paper is that the energy consumption during the formation control process is restricted by the minimum-energy constraint in the sense of the linear matrix inequality. Firstly, the leader-following formation control protocol is proposed based on the relative state information of neighboring agents, where the total energy consumption is considered. Then, minimum-energy leader-following formation design and analysis criteria are presented in the form of the linear matrix inequality, which can be checked by the generalized eigenvalue method. Especially, the value of the minimum-energy constraint is determined. An illustrative simulation is provided to show the effectiveness of the main results.