Shape and Orientation Control of Moving Formation with Local Measurements in Three-Dimensional Space

This paper proposes a distributed formation con-trol law for the multi-agent systems in three-dimensional space. The first agent (leader) moves with the reference velocity and the reference velocity is unknown to the other agents. The local coordinate systems are not aligned and not shared with each other. Furthermore, it is supposed that each agent measures only the relative position of its neighbors. To design the distributed control law, the distance-based formation control method and velocity estimation are utilized. Consequently, using only local information, the shape and orientation of the moving formation is controlled to asymptotically converge into the desired states. The stability and convergence of the system are mathematically analyzed and the numerical simulation is also performed to verify the analytic results.