Flocking Control for Multiple Subgroups Based on Multi-Hop Communication and Connectivity Maintenance Strategies

This paper presents a distributed flocking control method for multiple interconnected subgroups so that agents within each subgroup can assemble and form a lattice structure through local information exchanges. To ensure aggregation of each subgroup, each agent computes and tracks the estimated centroid of its own subgroup by using the relayed information of group members via multi-hop information transmission. To ensure boundedness of the estimation errors for subgroup centroids, the control input and the velocity of each agent are confined to be finite values. And to ensure the existence of communication paths among group members, a connectivity maintenance strategy is adopted which allows agents to estimate the algebraic connectivity of the entire communication network in a distributed manner. Numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed group flocking control method.