Flocking of multi-agent dynamic systems with guaranteed group connectivity

This paper investigates distributed flocking problem where the information exchange among agents is modeled by the communication topology changing with time. Previous research on this problem establishes group stabilization by assuming that the dynamic topology is connected all the time, which however can not be guaranteed by most proposed distributed control laws. In this paper, a distributed algorithm to distill a necessary subgraph of the initial communication topology is presented. We prove that the communication topology is always connected as long as this subgraph is connected. A distributed control law is then designed to achieve the flocking motion while preserving all the edges in this subgraph. In this way, flocking problem can be solved only provided the initial communication topology of multi-agent system is connected.