Agent-localized conditions for formation maintenance

We study the problem of maintaining a formation of vehicles within close bounds of a desired configuration in the case where there is no central controller for the formation, and under the assumption that information that a vehicle has about its neighbors´ states is generally delayed. The information flow between the vehicles of a formation is assumed to occur in discrete time. This necessitates the study of the overall formation (including information flow) to also be in discrete time. Thus the overall problem of maintaining the formation is characterized by an interaction between the continuous time dynamics of the agents and the discrete time nature of the information flow.