Formation Control With Obstacle Avoidance for a Class of Stochastic Multiagent Systems

This paper addresses formation control with obstacle avoidance problem for a class of second-order stochastic nonlinear multiagent systems under directed topology. Different with deterministic multiagent systems, stochastic cases are more practical and challenging because the exogenous disturbances depicted by the Wiener process are considered. In order to achieve control objective, both the leader-follower formation approach and the artificial potential field (APF) method are combined together, where the artificial potential is utilized to solve obstacle avoidance problem. For obtaining good system robustness to the undesired side effects of the artificial potential, H
_∞
analysis is implemented. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, it is proven that control objective can be achieved, of which obstacle avoidance is proven by finding an energy function satisfying that its time derivative is positive. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formation schemes.