Circular formation control of multiagent systems with any preset phase arrangement (Q1629590)

Summary: This paper deals with the circular formation control problem of multiagent systems for achieving any preset phase distribution. The control problem is decomposed into two parts: the first is to drive all the agents to a circle which either needs a target or not and the other is to arrange them in positions distributed on the circle according to the preset relative phases. The first part is solved by designing a circular motion control law to push the agents to approach a rotating transformed trajectory, and the other is settled using a phase-distributed protocol to decide the agents' positioning on the circle, where the ring topology is adopted such that each agent can only sense the relative positions of its neighboring two agents that are immediately in front of or behind it. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed, and the performance of the proposed controller is verified through simulations.