ABSTRACT
Proliferation of communication channels into control loops has enabled plethora of applications that abstractly engaged the attention of control engineers. Control loops integrated with communication channels for information exchange are called networked control systems. Formation control has been widely investigated both in the control and in the multi-agent systems paradigm. One major challenge in the implementation in multi-agent systems paradigm is the presence of communication channels that are used for achieving coordination among various agents in the team. As communication channels are usually associated with packet loss, maintaining a formation can become increasingly difficult in the presence of packet loss. The chapter presents an estimation-based formation control algorithm that is robust to packet loss among agents. The proposed estimation algorithm employs a minimal spanning tree algorithm to compute the estimate of the node variables. Finally, the chapter illustrates effectiveness of the proposed algorithm using suitable simulation example.
