Online Leader Selection for Improved Collective Tracking and Formation Maintenance

TitleOnline Leader Selection for Improved Collective Tracking and Formation Maintenance
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsFranchi, A, Robuffo Giordano, P
JournalIEEE Trans. on Control of Network Systems
Volume5
Issue1
Pagination3-13
Date Published01/2018
KeywordsLeader selection
Abstract

The goal of this work is to propose an extension of the popular leader-follower framework for multi-agent collective tracking and formation maintenance in presence of a time- varying leader. In particular, the leader is persistently selected online so as to optimize the tracking performance of an exogenous collective velocity command while also maintaining a desired formation via a (possibly time-varying) communication-graph topology. The effects of a change in the leader identity are theoretically analyzed and exploited for defining a suitable error metric able to capture the tracking performance of the multi- agent group. Both the group performance and the metric design are found to depend upon the spectral properties of a special directed graph induced by the identity of the chosen leader. By exploiting these results, as well as distributed estimation techniques, we are then able to detail a fully-decentralized adaptive strategy able to periodically select online the best leader among the neighbors of the current leader. Numerical simulations show that the application of the proposed technique results in an improvement of the overall performance of the group behavior w.r.t. other possible strategies.

Citation Key2016e-FraRob
AttachmentSize
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