A novel communication-aware formation control strategy for dynamical multi-agent systems

In the classical studies of formation control, it is typically difficult to realize full potential of communication channels between agents, since the adopted communication links are typically assumed to be ideal or ideal within a certain communication range. In this paper, a more realistic communication channel model is considered and a new communication-aware formation control approach is proposed with the objective of optimizing communication performance of formation systems. A sufficient and necessary condition is found for feasible formation in realistic communication environments. Then a communication-aware formation control is proposed for multi-agent systems with switching topology. It is rigorously proved that the proposed algorithm can optimize the communication performance of formation systems. A simulation example is provided to illustrate the proposed design.