Formation control of multiple elliptical agents with limited sensing ranges

This paper presents a design of cooperative controllers that force a group of N mobile agents with an elliptical shape and with limited sensing ranges to perform a desired formation. The controllers guarantee no collisions between any agents in the group. The desired formation can be stabilized at feasible reference trajectories with bounded time derivatives. The formation control design is based on an algebraic separation condition between ellipses, Lyapunov’s method, and smooth or p-times differentiable step functions. These functions are introduced and incorporated into novel potential functions to solve the collision avoidance problem without the need for switchings under the agents’ limited sensing ranges.