Conservation and decay laws in distributed coordination control systems

In this paper we discuss and discover several conservation and associated decay laws in distributed coordination control systems, in particular in formation shape control systems. Specifically, we reveal conservations of linear momentum and angular momentum for gradient-based multi-agent formation systems modelled by single integrators, and show several corresponding conservation/decay laws for double-integrator formation stabilization systems and double-integrator flocking systems, respectively. By exploiting translation and rotation symmetry properties and insights from Noether’s theorem, we further establish a multi-agent version of the relation between symmetry and conservation laws for gradient-based coordination systems derived from general potential functions, fromwhichwe generalize the conservation/decay laws to more general networked coordination control systems. The results hold in ambient spaces of any dimensions, and we focus on the 2-D and 3-D cases due to their natural interpretation as positions of agents. © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.