Formation maneuvering with collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance

This paper proposes a switching control strategy for formation maneuvering control of multi-agent systems with guaranteed collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance properties. The control strategy consists of three parts: formation maneuvering, collision avoidance, and connectivity maintenance control. We adopt the idea of using complex Laplacian for formation maneuvering control, which gives rise to one degree of freedom in scaling the size of the achievable formations and thus enables collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance possible in the meantime. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control strategy.