On the Tight Formation

for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

Ionela Prodan1,2 , Sorin Olaru1 , Cristina Stoica1 , and Silviu-Iulian Niculescu2
1

SUPELEC Systems Sciences (E3S) - Automatic Control Department,

Gif sur Yvette, France
{ionela.prodan,sorin.olaru,cristina.stoica}@supelec.fr
SUPELEC CNRS - Laboratory of Signal and Systems, Gif sur Yvette, France
{ionela.prodan,silviu.niculescu}@lss.supelec.fr

Abstract. This paper addresses the real-time control of multiple agents

in the presence of disturbances and non-convex collision avoidance constraints. The goal is to guarantee the convergence towards a tight formation. A single optimal control problem is solved based on a prediction of
the future evolution of the system and the resulting controller is implemented in a centralized way. At the supervision level, it is shown that
the decision about which agents should take on what role in the desired
tight formation is equivalent with a classical pairing (or task assignment)
problem. Furthermore, the pairing is re-evaluated at each iteration. The
proposed method exhibits eective performance validated through some
illustrative examples.
Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, invariant sets, non-convex constraints,
constrained MPC.

Introduction

The formation of multiple agents is important in many applications involving

the control of cooperative systems [3], as for example, in adversary games applications where the sensor assets are limited. Agent formations allow each member
of the team to concentrate its sensors across a specied region of the workspace,
while their neighboring members cover the rest of the workspace. Furthermore,
in applications like search and rescue, coverage tasks and security patrols, the
agents direct their visual and radar search responsibilities depending on their
positions in the formation [1]. Other applications include coordinated ocean platform control for a mobile oshore base [2]. The homogeneous modules forming
the oshore base must be able to perform long-term station keeping at sea, in
the presence of waves, winds and currents. Therefore, the independent modules
have to be controlled in order to be maintained aligned (i.e., they converge to a
tight formation).


The research of Ionela Prodan is nancially supported by the EADS Corporate

Foundation (091-AO09-1006).

G. Jezic et al. (Eds.): KES-AMSTA 2012, LNAI 7327, pp. 554565, 2012.
c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012


On the Tight Formation for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

555

Furthermore, the problem of maintaining a formation becomes even more

challenging if one needs to ensure that all the agents avoid collisions inside the
group [14].
There is a large literature dedicated to the formation control for a collection of
vehicles using potential eld approach [16], or approaches based on graph theory
[7]. The authors of [5] and [16] investigate the motions of vehicles modeled as
double integrators. Their objective is for the vehicles to achieve a common velocity while avoiding collisions with obstacles and/or agents assumed to be points.
The derived control laws involve graph Laplacians for an associated undirected
graph and also nonlinear terms resulting from articial potential functions.
The main goal of this paper is to control a set of agents having independent
dynamics while achieving a global objective, such as a tight formation with
desired specications and collision free behavior. For reducing the computation
time we use the nominal behavior of the agents and consider safety regions
around them to compensate for the eects of the disturbances aecting the real
systems. Further, these regions are dened within the theory of invariant sets in
order to avoid recomputations during the real-time functioning. The formation
control problem is decomposed in two separate problems:
The o-line denition of the ideal conguration. A minimal conguration is
determined with respect to a given cost function under the constraints imposed
by the safety regions.
In real-time, a receding horizon optimization combined with task assignment
relative to the minimal conguration will be employed.
The real-time control is designed based on the following two-stage procedure:
1. Determine "who-goes-where" in the formation. This is equivalent with solving a standard assignment problem, which is a special case of the so-called
Hitchcock Transportation Problem (TP) [11].
2. Solve a mixed-integer optimization problem according to the target geometry
of the formation and the associated safety regions.
Finally, this two separate problems are embedded within a Model Predictive
Control (MPC) problem (see, for instance, [9] for basic notions in MPC), leading to an optimization problem for driving the group of agents to a specied
formation with associated target locations.
In the present paper, we revise the preliminary results obtained in [12] and
introduce enhancements in the control design method which enables the stabilization of the multi-agent formation. We show that for the convergence to the
predened formation an additional xed point constraint (i.e., the target positions are also equilibrium points for the considered dynamics) must be taken
into account. Moreover other contributions of the paper are, on the one hand,
the reduction in the computational cost and, on the other hand, the ecient
handling of an increased number of constraints.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the individual
agents model and the set invariance concept. Furthermore, Section 3 presents the
conguration of the desired multi-agent formation. Section 4 states the
mixed-integer optimal control problem embedded within MPC. Finally, several

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I. Prodan et al.

concluding remarks are drawn in Section 6 and the illustrative examples are presented in Section 5.
The following notations will be used throughout
 the paper. Minkowskis
 addition of two sets X and Y is dened as X Y = A + B : A X , B Y . Let
xk+1|k denote the value of x at time instant k+1, predicted upon the information
available at time k N.

Preliminaries and Prerequisites

2.1

System Description

Consider a set of Na linear systems (vehicles, pedestrians or agents in a general

form) which model the behavior of individual agents. The ith system is described
by the following discrete LTI dynamics aected by additive disturbances:
xik+1d = Ai xikd + Bi uikd + wki ,

i = 1, . . . , Na ,

(1)

where xikd Rn are the state variables, uikd Rm is the control input and
wki Rn represents a bounded disturbance for the agent i. Henceforth we assume
the following:
1. The pair (Ai , Bi ) is stabilizable, with Ai Rnn , Bi Rnm .
2. The disturbance wi is bounded, i.e. wi W i , where W i is a convex and
compact set containing the origin.
Theoretically, formulation (1) suces for solving any typical multi-agent control
problem (e.g., formation stability, trajectory tracking and so forth). However,
the presence of additive noises makes the numerical computation dicult and
severely limits the practical implementability. This is particularly true for centralized schemes where the computations are to be made into an extended space.
The solution followed here is based on the ideas in [10]. As a rst step, we
consider the nominal systems associated to (1):
xik+1 = Ai xik + Bi uik ,

i = 1, . . . , Na .

(2)

By linking the control laws associated to dynamics (1) and (2), respectively,
through the relation
(3)
uikd = uik + Ki (xikd xik ),
we observe that the tracking error of the ith system, dened as zki  xikd xik ,
is given by:
i
= (Ai + Bi Ki )zki + wki .
(4)
zk+1
Assuming that Ki makes the closed-loop state matrix Ai + Bi Ki to be Schur1 ,
it follows that an RPI (see Denition 1) set Si can be determined and the real
1

The stabilizability hypothesis on the pair (Ai , Bi ) implies the existence of an optimal
control law for each agent i, Ki Rnm such that the matrices Ai + Bi Ki are
stable, where the controller Ki , i = 1, . . . , Na is constructed either by a Linear
Quadratic (LQ) design using the solution of the discrete algebraic Riccati equation
or alternatively by pole placement technique.

On the Tight Formation for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

557

trajectory generated by (1) will reside in a tube centered along the nominal
trajectory generated by (2):
xikd xik Si xikd {xik } Si

(5)

as long as2 z0i Si for any k 0.

This permits to consider the nominal system in the subsequent optimization
problems and thus minimize the necessary numerical computations.
Denition 1. A set Rn is robustly positive invariant (RPI) for the discretetime system xk+1 = xk + with the perturbation Rn , i .
A set is minimal robustly invariant (mRPI) for some given dynamics i it
is a RPI set in Rn contained in every RPI set for the given dynamics.
There are various algorithms able to oer arbitrarily close RPI approximation for a mRPI set (as for example, the approaches proposed by [13]). It is
worth mentioning that these algorithms ignore the exponentially increase in the
complexity of representation.
2.2

Collision Avoidance Formulation

A typical multi-agent problem is the minimization of some cost problem with

constraints. As stated before, the original formulation, with dynamics (1) is
not optimal since it requires to take into account the bounded disturbances
aecting the dynamics. Hereafter we will use the nominal dynamics (2) and
we will analyze how conditions on the real dynamics (1) are transposed to the
nominal dynamics case.
A classical issue in multi-agent formations is the collision avoidance. Using
the notation of (1), the condition that any two agents do not collide translates
into:
(6)
{xid } {xjd } = , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j.
Using the notation from (2) and assuming that the conditions validating relation
(5) are veried, we reach the equivalent formulation:
{xi Si } {xj Sj } = , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j.

(7)

This condition takes explicitly (through the use of the sets Si , Sj ) into account
the uncertainties introduced by the bounded perturbation in (1).
Let us recall that for any two convex sets A, B the following equivalence is
true:
A B = 0
/ A {B} .
(8)
Using (8), we obtain the equivalent formulation for (7):
/ Sj (Si ) , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j.
xi xj
2

(9)

The assumption that the tracking error starts inside the set is made for simplication
reasons. As long as the set is contractive, after a nite number of steps, any trajectory
starting outside will enter inside the set.

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I. Prodan et al.

Remark 1. The obstacle avoidance problem can be treated in a similar way: xi

/
Ol , where {Ol }l=1,...,M denotes the collection of xed obstacles (if a particular
obstacle is non-convex, it may be seen as a union of convex sets). Then the
conditions that have to be veried is:
/ Ol (Si ) , i = 1, . . . , Na , l = 1, . . . , M.
xi

(10)

Remark 2. Note that, a solution using parametrized polyhedra (see, for instance,
[8]) to describe the safety regions of the agents is presented in [12]. For guaranteeing that two (or more) agents do not superpose, the parametrized intersections of
the invariant sets are considered and then, the domain for which the intersections
are void is described. However, we note that this approach is computationally
demanding.
Remark 3. The main technical diculty encountered in this paper is the fact
that, often, the feasible regions are non-convex. This problem rises naturally
from separation conditions (see condition (9) and Remark 1). The solution is to
use the mixed-integer programming techniques [6]. This allows us to express the
original non-convex feasible region as a convex set in an extended space. Such
an approach leads to a signicant number of binary variables in the problem
formulation, thus leading to unrealistic computational times (in the worst-case
scenarios, an exponential increase dependent of the number of binary variables).
A method for reducing the computational time is detailed in [15], where we
propose a technique for making the time of computation P-hard in the number
of Linear/Quadratic Programming (LP/QP) subproblems that have to be solved.

3
3.1

The Configuration of Multi-agent Formations

Minimal Conguration of the Multi-agent Formation O-Line

The goal of clustering the agents as close as possible to the origin is realized
through a minimal conguration for the group of agents (2). We pose the problem
as an optimization problem where the cost function is the sum of the square
distances of each agent from the origin and the constraints are the ones imposing
collision avoidance (9):
min

(xi ,ui ),

i=1,...,Na

Na


xi 22 ,


subject to:

xi xj
/ Sj {Si } ,
xi = Ai xi + Bi ui , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j.

i=1

(11)
Solving the mixed-integer optimization problem (11), a set of target positions
and the associated control laws are obtained:


Na
a
,
u
)
T = (x1f , u1f ), (x2f , u2f ), . . . , (xN
,
(12)
f
f
where every pair (xif , uif ) is a xed state/input of the ith agent.

On the Tight Formation for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

559

Remark 4. Note that the second constraint in (11) is a xed point condition.
That is, the optimization problem will nd only pairs (xif , uif ), i = 1, . . . , Na
which are also a xed point for the considered dynamics, (2). Geometrically,
this means that the points xif will nd themselves on the associated subspaces
spanned by (In Ai )1 Bi . In particular, if the agents have the same dynamics
(i.e., homogeneous agents), they will have a common subspace over which to
select the xed points xif .
3.2

Task Assignment Formulation On-Line

In the particular case of homogeneous3 agents (understood here as agents with

the same safety regions) we can intercalate an additional step in the control
mechanism. Since the agents have the same safety regions, we can change who
goes where in the minimal conguration computed in the previous subsection.
This is equivalent with nding the best permutation over the set of the nal positions in the target formation, T from (12). This is in fact the optimal assignment
problem encountered in the eld of combinatorial optimization [4].
If one associates a cost with the assignment of agent j to target xif as cij , the
problem of nding the best assignment is dened as:

N
a

ij = 1,

Na 
Na
i=1

N
a
cij ij , subject to:
min
(13)
ij = 1,

ij , i,j=1,...,Na

i=1 j=1
j=1

{0, 1},
ij
where ij are the decision variables: 1 if target xif is assigned to agent j and
0 otherwise. These binary variables ensure that each agent is assigned to one
unique target position.
The problem is dened by the choice of the cost weights cij , the simplest
way is to choose it as the distance between the actual position of agent j and
the desired target position in the formation. Hence, the problem would be to
determine the minimal distance that an agent has to travel to establish the
optimal assignment in the specied formation. A more insightful way is to use
the unconstrained dynamics (2) of the agents to describe the cost of reaching
from the initial position to the desired position. Then, cij can be described by a
weighted norm:
cij = (xj xif )T P (xj xif ),

i, j = 1, . . . , Na

(14)

with the matrix P = P T 0 given by the Lyapunov function or the innite time
cost-to-go, as long as the agents follow the unconstrained optimum through the
control action:
uj = Kj (xj xif ) + uj , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j,
3

(15)

In the heterogeneous case the reassignment of the nal destination points is no longer
feasible since the swapping of the safety regions will result in collisions of the agents.

560

I. Prodan et al.

where u
j is chosen such that xjf = Aj xif + Bj uj , with u
j = Bj1 (I Aj )xif , if
the matrix Bj is invertible (or the alternative pseudo-inverse which allows the
denition of a xed point for the nominal trajectory). This optimization problem
can be reduced to a simple LP problem, hence it can be eciently computed.

Receding Horizon Optimization Problem

The goal is to drive the agents to a minimal conguration (12) (if possible,
applying optimization (13)) while in the same time avoiding collisions along
their evolution towards the formation.
To this end, we will consider the set of Na constrained systems as a global
system dened as:
k ,
(16)
xk+1 = Ag xk + Bg u
with the corresponding vectors which collects the states and the inputs of
T T
T
a
each individual nominal system (2) at time k, i.e., x
k = [x1k | |xN
] ,
k
T

a
u
= [u1k | |uN
]T and the matrices which describe the model: Ag =
k
diag[A1 , . . . , ANa ], Bg = diag[B1 , . . . , BNa ].
We consider an optimal control problem for the global system where the
cost function and the constraints couple the dynamic behavior of the individual
agents. Also, perfect knowledge of each agent dynamics described by equation (2)
is available to all the other agents. Consequently, the global model will be used
in a predictive control context which permits the use of non-convex constraints
for collision avoidance behavior.
A nite receding horizon implementation is typically based on the solution
of an open-loop optimization problem.
An optimal control action
u
is obtained


k|k , u
k+1|k , . . . , u
k+N 1|k as a result of the
from the control sequence u
 u
optimization problem:

xk+1|k , . . . , x
k+N |k , u
k|k , . . . , uk+N 1|k ),
u
= arg minVN (

u

x
k+l|k = Ag xk+l1|k + Bg uk+l1|k , l = 1, . . . , N
subject to:
/ Sj {Si } , i, j = 1, . . . , Na , i = j,
Hij xk+l|k

(17)

I . . . I . . . 0] is a projection matrix which permits to

where Hij  [0 . . . 

i

rewrite the collision avoidance between two agents i and j in the notation of the
centralized system (16)4 .
In order to assure that the target positions (12) we require a cost function
which is minimized in the destination points (and not the origin):

Using the elements provided in Remark 3, the computational complexity of (17) can
be assessed to a polynomial number of QP problems.

On the Tight Formation for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

561

N 1
i(k) T

VN (
xk|k , u
k|k ) = (
xk+N |k xf

i(k)
) P (k+N |k xf )+

i(k) T

(
xk+N |k xf

xk+N |k xi(k) )+
) Q(
f

l=1

N 1

i(k)

(
uT
k+l|k uf

i(k)

uk+l|k u
)R(
f

),

(18)

l=0

i(k)

i(k)

with (xf , uf ) represents the optimal target positions and the associated
= Q
T 0, R
> 0 are
control laws at current time k, i = 1, . . . , Na . Here Q
the weighting matrices with appropriate dimensions, P = P T 0 denes the
terminal cost and N denotes the length of the prediction horizon.
First let us summarize in the following algorithm the receding horizon strategy
together with task assignment mechanism:
Algorithm 1. Centralized scheme strategy for a group of agents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Input: initial positions of the agents

compute the safety regions associated to each agent;
compute the minimal conguration as in (11);
compute the matrices dening the cost function (18);
for k = 1 : kmax do
if the safety regions are identical then
execute task assignment xikref xif as in (13);
end
nd the optimal control action u as in (17);
compute the next value of the state: x
k+1 = Ag x
k + Bg u
k
end

Due to the fact that we use invariant sets, steps 1, 2 and 3 can be executed in
an o-line procedure. In the on-line part of the algorithm, we apply a nite horizon trajectory optimization: in step 6 we execute a task assignment if possible
(only if the safety regions are identical) and then proceed with the actual computation of the receding horizon control (step 8). Finally, the rst component of
the resulting control sequence is eectively applied to the global system (step 9)
and the optimization procedure is reiterated using the available measurements
based on the receding horizon principle [9].
Remark 5. Although functional, this scheme will not scale favorably with an
increased number of agents or a large prediction horizon due to the numerical
diculties. In particular, the mixed programming algorithms are very sensitive
to the number of binary auxiliary variables. In this case a decentralized approach
is to be envisaged in order to minimize the numerical computations.
Remark 6. Note that although desirable, an increase in the length of the prediction horizon is not always practical, especially when using mixed-integer programming. We observed that a two-stage MPC, where in the rst stage a task
assignment procedure is carried and in the second, the usual optimization problem is solved oers good performances with a reduced computational eort.

562

I. Prodan et al.

Illustrative Example

For the illustrative example we consider that each of the agent is described by
the following dynamics and disturbances:

00 1
0
0 0
0.5

0 0 0
0 0

1
0.3
i
i
i

Ai =
=
=
w
:
|w
|

,
B
,
W
i
1
i
m 0
0.5 , (19)
0 0 mi 0

i
1
0 0 0 mi
0.2
0 mi
where [xi y i vxi vyi ]T , [uix uiy ]T are the state and the input of each system. The
components of the state are the position (xi , y i ) and the velocity (vxi , vyi ) of the
ith agent, i = 1, . . . , Na . The parameters mi , i are the mass and the damping
factor, respectively.

10

20

15

6
10
4
5

x2

x2

2
0

4
10
6
15

8
10
10

(a)

0
x1

10

Projection of the RPI set on the position

subspace

20

20
20

(b)

15

10

10

15

x1

The trajectories of the real and nominal system

50

50

40

40

15
30

step 20

20

20

10

0
5

10

step 10

x2

x2

x2

step 1

30

10

10

10

20

20

step 10
step 20

10
30
15
20
10

step 1

30

40

0
x1

10

50
50

(c) The minimal configuration of four(d)

homogeneous agents

40

40

30

20

10

0
x1

10

20

30

40

50

The evolution of 4 homogeneous

agents with task assignment

50
50

40

30

20

10

0
x1

10

20

30

40

50

(e)

The evolution of 4 homogeneous

agents withought task assignment

Fig. 1. The tight formation of 4 homogeneous agents

First, let us consider Na = 4 homogeneous agents with mi = 45kg,

i = 15Ns/m, i = 1, . . . , 4. For the sake of illustration, we construct the RPI
sets (i.e.,the safety regions) for the homogeneous agents aected by disturbances. Using pole placement methods we derive the feedback gain matrices

On the Tight Formation for Multi-agent Dynamical Systems

563

Ki , i = 1, . . . , 4, which placed the poles of the closed-loop system in the 0.6 to

0.9 interval. The RPI sets Si are obtained as detailed in [13] and the projection
on the position subspace of one set is depicted in Figure 1 (a). For this system a
nominal trajectory (2) (in blue) is constructed and one observes in Figure 1 (b)
that any trajectory of system (1) aected by disturbance will verify relation (5)
(i.e., resides in a tube described by the RPI set Si ). Furthermore, by solving the
mixed-integer

optimization problem (11) we obtain the set of target positions
T = (xif , uif ) , i = 1, . . . , 4 as in (12), which satisfy the anti-collision conditions
(9) (see, Figure 1 (c)). As it can be seen in Figure 1 (c), for the case of agents
with the same dynamics (as detailed also in Remark 4) the equilibrium points
of (12) stay on the same subspace, which in this particular case is a line passing
through the origin.
We next apply the receding horizon scheme (17) for the global system with a
= I4 , R
= I2 .
prediction horizon N = 2 and the tunning parameters P = 5I4 , Q
The optimal trajectories for the agents are obtained such that the set of target
points is reached through task optimization and under state constraints. We
summarized the details in Algorithm 1. The eectiveness of the present algorithm
is conrmed by the simulation depicted in Figure 1 (d), where the evolution of the
agents is represented at three dierent time instances. The agents successfully
reach their target positions in the predened formation without violating the
constraints and with a minimum cost.
For comparison purposes we execute Algorithm 1 with and without the task
assignment stage. As it can be seen in Figure 1 (e) for a prediction horizon of N =
2 and without the task assignment procedure, the agents do not converge to the
desired conguration (two agents, depicted in blue and red, respectively switch
places). Note that if the prediction horizon is long enough (in this particular case
N = 8) the desired conguration is achieved but the computational complexity
of the mixed-integer optimization problem (11) increases signicantly.

15

50
40

10

step 1

30
20

5
x2

x2

10
0

step 20

10

20
5

30
40

10
6

(a)

x1

The target configuration of 4 heterogeneous

agents

50
50

(b)

40

30

20

10

0
x1

10

20

30

40

The evolution of 4 heterogeneous agents

Fig. 2. The tight formation of 4 heterogeneous agents

50

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I. Prodan et al.

Second, let us consider Na = 4 heterogeneous agents with dierent values

of the parameters mi and i , i = 1, . . . , 4. The prediction horizon is N = 7
= I4 , R
= I2 . Following the
and the tunning parameters are P = 50I4 , Q
same procedure we depict in Figure 2 (a) the agents with the associated safety
regions in a minimal conguration. Furthermore, in Figure 2 (b) we illustrate
the evolution of the agents at two dierent time instances.

Conclusions

In this paper, we rst present several tools in order to provide a systematic oline procedure for the control of a group of agents towards a minimal conguration. Second, in real-time a two stage receding horizon control design is adopted
for driving the agents to the predened formation. Also, we provide several remarks, leading to computational improvements of the mixed-integer techniques
used to assure a collision free behavior along the evolution of the agents. The
results are presented through some illustrative simulations of several examples.
The current research is to develop software-in-the-loop simulations and subsequent ight tests for the control of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The
vehicle dynamics is simulated by a Piccolo software and then, the control algorithm is transmitted in real ight simulations through a communication routine
running on a PC on the ground.

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