Moving area tracking formation control of multiple autonomous agents

This paper investigates a moving area tracking formation control (MATFC) problem of multiple autonomous agents, which aims at driving a group of agents to achieve a desired formation configuration and track a moving area. By using local information interaction among agents, a distributed MATFC protocol is proposed for single integrator dynamics. Without requiring the position and velocity of the center of the sub-area are bounded, the MATFC problem obtains greater application potential. During the moving process, the formation size can be regulated in real time to adapt the complicated environment through a scaling parameter. By adding a rotation matrix, the spatial orientation of each agent is capable of transforming in different cases. Then, based on the Lyapunov stability theory, it is verified that the objective of MATFC problem can be achieved under the proposed control protocol. Finally, numerical simulation results are shown to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed MATFC protocol.