Collision-free formation control for multi-agent systems using sample-date interactions

This paper investigates the collision-free formation control problem for the second-order multi-agent systems (MAS) under sample-date interactions. Considering that only a part of followers have access to the motion of the leader, a distributed observer is developed to reconstruct the tracking information for each follower. Note that in the cyber layer, only the sampled date is utilized and the observed state is updated at sampled instants, which helps alleviate the communication occupation. In the physical layer, a control barrier function (CBF)-based algorithm is proposed based on backstepping framework. By virtue of quadratic programming (QP) method, the constrained problem is formulated to generate an optimal guidance law without compromising the stability and safety constraints. In this way, each follower is able to achieve the formation tracking objective without collisions among static and moving obstacles. The stability of the system is verified via Lyapunov analysis and the simulations are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.