2006-2008 Best Paper
“Rigidity and Persistence for Ensuring Shape Maintenance of Multi-Agent Meta-Formations”

J.M. Hendrickx
Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium

C. Yu, B. Fidan, and B.D.O. Anderson
The Australian National University and NICTA, Australia

Issue：Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 131-143, 2008

ABSTRACT

This paper treats the problem of merging formations, where the underlying model of a formation is graphical. We first analyze the rigidity and persistence of meta-formations, which are formations obtained by connecting several rigid or persistent formations. Persistence is a generalization to directed graphs of the undirected notion of rigidity. In the context of moving autonomous agent formations, persistence characterizes the efficacy of a directed structure of unilateral distance constraints seeking to preserve a formation shape. We derive then, for agents evolving in a two- or three-dimensional space, the conditions under which a set of persistent formations can be merged into a persistent meta-formation, and give the minimal number of interconnections needed for such a merging. We also give conditions for a meta-formation obtained by merging several persistent formations to be persistent.

Paper