Collision-free Source Seeking and Flocking Control of Multi-agents with Connectivity Preservation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed control method for multi-agent systems that enables source seeking and flocking while ensuring collision avoidance and connectivity preservation, using only onboard sensors and CBF-based optimization.

Contribution

It proposes a novel CBF-based distributed control algorithm for multi-agent flocking and source seeking with guaranteed safety and connectivity.

Findings

Successfully achieves collision-free flocking with source seeking in simulations.

Guarantees connectivity preservation among agents during movement.

Provides stability analysis of the proposed control system.

Abstract

In this article, we present a distributed source-seeking and flocking control method for networked multi-agent systems with non-holonomic constraints. Based solely on identical on-board sensor systems, which measure the source local field, the group objective is attained by appointing a leader agent to seek the source while the remaining follower agents safely form a cohesive flocking with their neighbors using a distributed flocking control law in a connectivity-preserved undirected network. To guarantee safe separation and group motion for all agents and to solve the conflicts with the "cohesion" flocking rule of Reynolds, the distributed control algorithm is solved individually through feasible CBF-based optimization problem with complex constraints, which guarantees the inter-agent collision avoidance and connectivity preservation. Stability analysis of the closed-loop system is presented and the efficacy of the methods is shown in simulation results.