Flocking in target pursuit for multi-agent systems with partial informed agents

In this study, the authors investigate the problem of flocking motion combined with topology optimisation for mobile multi-agent systems. In most of the recent literatures, all agents are assumed to be informed of target´s information for all time to maintain connectivity. Actually, it is not essential to make all agents be informed. In this study, the authors present a distributed topology optimisation scheme to reduce the communication complexity of keeping connectivity while the multi-agent system pursuits a virtual target. This optimisation scheme is performed in the discrete space of graphs and relies on two key ideas. First, it generates optimally rigid graphs for each agent with its neighbouring flockmates. Second, partial agents are selected as the informed units to maintain the connectivity of the multi-agent system. Based on this scheme, the authors propose a distributed motion controller to make the mobile agents result in flocking behaviour. Applying the proposed algorithms, it is shown that the communication energy dissipation of the networked system is decreased. Stability analysis is further achieved by using differential conclusions and non-smooth analysis in switching topology. Numerical simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.