Formation control of mobile agents using local potential functions

A constructive method is presented to design controllers that force a group of N mobile agents to achieve a particular formation in terms of shape and orientation while avoiding collisions between themselves. The control development is based on new local potential functions, which attain the minimum value when the desired formation is achieved, and are equal to infinity when a collision occurs. The formation shape changes such as expansion, contraction and rotation are allowed under the proposed control scheme.