Formation control: a review and a new consideration

In this paper, we presented a review on the current control issues and strategies on a group of unmanned autonomous vehicles/robots formation. Formation control has broad applications and becomes an active research topic in the recent years. In this paper, we attempt to review the key issues in formation control with a focus on the main control strategies for formation control under different kinds of scenarios. Then, we point out some important open questions and the possible future research directions on formation control. This paper contributes with a new and interesting consideration on formation control and its application in distributed parameter systems. We pointed out that formation control should be classified as formation regulation control and formation tracking control, similar to regulator and tracker in conventional control.