Distributed formation tracking with connectivity preservation and orientation alignment

This paper investigates the formation tracking problem incorporating connectivity preservation and orientation alignment for multi-agent systems. Consider the body-fixed frame of each agent in the multi-agent system is initialized with different orientations. To achieve formation controller design by relative position in the body-fixed frame, the orientation of the frames should be aligned first. A distributed passive-based orientation controller is proposed to ensure convergence of all body-fixed frames toward a unified desired orientation. Once the frames are aligned, a barrier Lyapunov function (BLF)-based formation tracking controller is proposed utilizing the displacement of the agent to ensure the distances between agents always satisfy predefined distance constraints. This strategy guarantees inter-agent collision avoidance and connectivity preservation throughout the formation. Numerical simulations are conducted to validate the efficacy of the proposed approach.