Predictive Control for Tight Group Formation of Multi-Agent Systems*

This paper addresses the real-time control problem of a group of agents in the presence of non-convex collision avoidance constraints. The goal is to guarantee the convergence towards a tight formation. Convex (polyhedral) regions will be used to define safety regions around each agent. Then, using the dynamics and constraints, an optimization-based control design can be adopted upon an appropriate receding horizon principle. A single optimal control problem is solved based on a prediction of the future evolution of the system and the resulting control law is implemented in a centralized way. At the supervision level, it is shown that the decision about which agents should take on what role in the desired tight formation is equivalent with a classical pairing (or task assignment) problem. An important contribution is the re-evaluation of the pairing at each iteration. Copyright © IFAC 2011