Survey on the formation control of multi-agent system

Formation control is a main topic of the coordination control of multi-agent system, its aim is to steer the overall system to track with the predefined path while keep some specific geometric patterns through information exchange between agents. The main problems of formation control are reviewed in this paper, including the stability and controllability of formation control, and communication issues in the multi-agent system. The approaches of formation control can be roughly classified into four kinds, namely behavior-based, virtual structure, leader-follower and model predictive control. The possible future research directions on formation control are pointed out in the end.