Leader-Following Formation of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems With Time-Varying Topology: A Virtual Neighbor Framework

This paper presents a set-membership control approach for formation tracking in heterogeneous leader-following multi-agent systems. In order to improve the adaptability of the control strategy to changes in topology, a virtual neighbor is constructed for each follower, which represents the combined influence of all its neighbors. With the help of virtual neighbors, the interaction relationships between agents can be hidden, thereby mitigating the impact of topology changes on controller design. Then, a novel time-varying topology with adaptive adjacent weights is proposed, such that the coupling strength between agents can be actively adjusted to improve the formation performance. Subsequently, the set-membership technique is utilized to establish the optimization problems to ensure that the one-step forward tracking errors can be constrained within the ellipsoid sets. Further, an online algorithm is developed to continuously obtain the optimal controllers by solving the optimization problems recursively. Finally, the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach are demonstrated via a numerical simulation and its application on a robotic platform with UAVs and UGVs.