A distributed receding horizon control scheme for leader-follower architectures: a set-theoretic approach

In this paper we present a novel receding horizon control scheme for solving the formation problem of leader-follower configurations. The algorithm is based on set-theoretic ideas and is tuned for agents described by linear time-invariant (LTI) systems subject to input and state constraints. Terminal robust positively invariant regions and sequences of pre-computed inner approximations of the one-step controllable sets are on-line exploited to compute the commands to be applied in a receding horizon fashion. Moreover, we prove that the design of both terminal sets and one-step ahead controllable regions is achieved in a distributed sense. Experiments are finally performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.