A Leader-Follower Flocking Algorithm Based on Estimated Flocking States

This paper investigates the design of flocking control algorithms for a group of agents with leader-follower architecture where only a fraction of members have access to the global navigation information. To maintain the cohesion and alignment of the group, a consensus protocol is proposed to estimate the expected position and velocity of the flocking center by each agent, and a control algorithm with state feedback is designed to drive agents towards the estimated state. Navigation information is integrated into the process of distributed state estimation by leaders. In addition, a fuzzy-logic based repulsive function is employed to model the separation component for collision avoidance. A series of numerical experiments are performed, and verify that a group of agents are able to track targets of varying velocity without its acceleration information under the control of the proposed algorithm.