On the Role and Compensation of Distance Mismatches in Rigid Formation Control for Second-Order Agents

Abstract : This paper presents a robustness analysis of gradient-based formation control law for second-order agents subjected to distance mismatches or constant disturbances. It is shown that, akin to the first-order case, the existence of these mismatches introduces two undesired group behaviors: a distorted final shape and a stationary group motion. We show that such undesired properties can be compensated by combining the gradient-based rigid formation control law and our proposed distributed estimators.