Formation control with binary information

TL;DR

This paper presents a formation control method for passive systems using extremely coarse binary information, enabling exact formation keeping and trajectory tracking despite limited data exchange.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control approach that achieves exact formation maintenance with binary relative position information, a significant improvement over existing quantized control methods.

Findings

Exact formation control is achievable with binary information.

The control laws are simple and finite-valued.

The method effectively rejects disturbances while tracking trajectories.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of formation keeping of a network of strictly passive systems when very coarse information is exchanged. We assume that neighboring agents only know whether their relative position is larger or smaller than the prescribed one. This assumption results in very simple control laws that direct the agents closer or away from each other and take values in finite sets. We show that the task of formation keeping while tracking a desired trajectory and rejecting matched disturbances is still achievable under the very coarse information scenario. In contrast with other results of practical convergence with coarse or quantized information, here the control task is achieved exactly.