Fault-tolerant multiagent robotic formation control exploiting system symmetries

This paper extends some prior work by the authors to address general robustness of solutions in multiagent coordination control problems. In particular, it focuses on fault-tolerant formation control. In our prior work, symmetries in the system were exploited to simplify the nonlinear Lyapunov stability analysis for symmetric systems. The type of symmetry considered is a discrete symmetry where the system is composed of many repeated instances of interacting identical agents. The results are based on Lyapunov methods, and hence are of general applicability and specifically these results are applicable to both distributed as well as non-distributed coordination methods. This paper considers the same types of systems and extends the stability results to the cases of robustness of formation stability under failure of individual agents.