Distributed Motion Coordination for Multi-agent Systems with Connectivity Maintenance Using Backbone-Based Networks

This paper addresses the problem of distributed connectivity constrained motion coordination of multiple autonomous mobile agents. Different from traditional flat network structure which lacks flexibility and scalability when performing complex spatially distributed tasks, a novel distributed framework for construction of backbone-based hierarchical communication networks is proposed. Firstly, the proposed method periodically extracts a subset of agents which can form the communication backbone from the original network using only local information, thus partitions the system into backbone agents and non-backbone agents. Furthermore, the global network connectivity of the system is maintained at two levels: connectivity-preserving potential functions are used to maintain existing links in the backbone; connectivity between backbone and non-backbone agents is achieved via a leaderfollower formation control scheme with backbone agents as the leaders. Finally, nontrivial numerical simulations are worked out to verify the theoretical results.