Formation control of vehicles using leader-following consensus

The formation control problem of a multi-vehicle system is dealt with by transforming it to a leader-following consensus problem. We focus on the case of constant spacing policy, i.e., to design a control strategy to make all the vehicles achieving a common value of velocities and maintaining a constant spacing between the vehicles. The leading vehicle (leader) is assumed to travel freely. We discuss three types of communication topologies between the vehicles. For each of them we propose a control protocol of the following vehicles (followers) by applying a leader-following consensus design approach and present a condition of input-to-state stability (ISS) of the formation. Simulation examples show that with these communication topologies, the designed strategy can make the system achieve ISS.