Decentralization of virtual linkage in formation control of multi-agents via consensus strategies

Featured Application: This paper addresses the formation control of a team of agents based on the decentralized control and the recently introduced reconfigurable virtual linkage approach. Following a decentralized control architecture, a decentralized virtual linkage approach is introduced. As compared to the original virtual linkage approach, the proposed approach uses decentralized architecture rather than hierarchical architecture, which does not require role assignments in each virtual link. In addition, each agent can completely decide its movement with only exchanging states with part of the team members, which makes this approach more suitable for situations when a large number of agents and/or limited communication are involved. Furthermore, the reconfiguration ability is enhanced in this approach by introducing the scale factor of each virtual link. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation results.