Contraction control of a fleet circular formation of AUVs under limited communication range

This work proposes a novel control algorithm dedicated to multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics. The aim of this paper is for the agents to form a circular formation whose center is fixed and whose radius is given by a time-varying reference. The problem of uniform distribution of all the agents along the circle is also addressed under the assumption of limited communication range. This communication constraint is tackled by using a cooperative control scheme which includes the Laplacian matrix of the communication graph (distance-dependent). The multi-agent system is simulated with Matlab. Videos showing the simulations are accessible though Web.