Two-agent connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance under two relationships

In this paper, we study a two-agent tracking problem with the connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance requirements (CM–CARs) under two relationships. One is the leader–follower relationship, where the leader just focuses on its tracking goal, but the follower still needs to ensure the CM–CARs for the leader. Since the feasible space of the follower is a nonconvex ring, it is inconvenient to search for a feasible control directly. Thus, we split the original nonconvex region and search for a convex one by a homeomorphism mapping. Under the leader–follower relationship, a control scheme is proposed for the follower in the original feasible region. It is transformed from a control protocol that ensures the follower satisfies the CM–CARs in the mapping convex region. The other is the colleague relationship, where two agents both need to satisfy the CM–CARs and their control strategies are interactive. Thus, we propose an optimization-based strategy to achieve the tracking mission for the two-agent system, which satisfies the CM–CARs. Finally, we provide some simulation results to verify the proposed strategies.