An Overview of Recent Progress in the Study of Distributed Multi-agent Coordination

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in distributed multi-agent coordination, covering topics like consensus, formation control, and optimization, highlighting key progress and future research directions in control systems and robotics since 2006.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in distributed multi-agent coordination, categorizing main research directions and identifying open problems for future work.

Findings

Significant progress in consensus algorithms and formation control.

Identification of open problems and promising research directions.

Enhanced understanding of multi-agent coordination in robotics and control systems.

Abstract

This article reviews some main results and progress in distributed multi-agent coordination, focusing on papers published in major control systems and robotics journals since 2006. Distributed coordination of multiple vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles, has been a very active research subject studied extensively by the systems and control community. The recent results in this area are categorized into several directions, such as consensus, formation control, optimization, task assignment, and estimation. After the review, a short discussion section is included to summarize the existing research and to propose several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for further investigations.