Goal Assignment in Leader-Following Formation Control of Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper, the goal assignment problem of second-order multi-agent systems is considered in the leader-following formation control framework. The goals of followers, which are defined as their relative positions with respect to the leader corresponding to a predefined target shape, are assumed to be interchangeable. During the operation of the multi -agent systems, the goals of a pair of followers are exchanged locally if an assignment condition is satisfied. Compared with the existing goal assignment studies utilizing the position information, the main feature of this paper is to derive a velocity-based assignment condition to deal with the assignment problem of second-order multi-agent systems. Based on the proposed goal assignment algorithm, it is verified that the transient leader-following formation control performance is improved in the sense of Lyapunov. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results.