Cooperative translation control based on consensus with reference velocity: A source-seeking application

This paper deals with the design of cooperative control laws for nonlinear multi-agent systems. On the first hand, the control objectives are to ensure that a group of agents reaches a time-varying circular formation characterized by some external references representing the position of the center of the formation and its derivatives. In order to reduce the amount of information to be shared, the second part of the paper considers the situation where only the velocity of the center of the formation is available to each agent. Then a distributed consensus algorithm is provided in order to satisfy the same control objectives. Finally, an application to the source-seeking problem is proposed to emphasize previous contribution. These results are supported through computer simulations.