Current distributed control methods have a lack of information exchange infrastructure to enable spatially evolving multiagent formations. Specifically, these methods are designed based on information exchange rules represented by a network having a single layer, where they lead to multiagent formations with fixed, nonevolving spatial properties. For situations where capable agents have to control the resulting formation through these methods, they can often do so if such agents have global information exchange ability. Yet, global information exchange is not practical for cases that have large numbers of agents and low-bandwidth peer-to-peer communications. Motivated from this standpoint, the contribution of this paper is to show how information exchange rules, which are represented by a network having multiple layers (multiplex information networks), can be designed for enabling spatially evolving multiagent formations. In particular, we first consider the formation assignment problem and then the formation tracking problem and introduce new distributed control architectures that allow capable agents to spatially alter the size and the orientation of the resulting formation without requiring global information exchange ability. In addition, tools and methods from differential potential fields are further utilized in order to generalize the proposed distribute control architecture for the formation tracking problem to allow for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance needed in real-world applications. Stability of the proposed architectures is theoretically analyzed and their efficacy is illustrated on numerical examples and on multiagent formation experiments.

中文翻译：

---

多重信息网络的编队控制

当前的分布式控制方法缺乏信息交换基础设施，无法实现空间演化的多主体形式。具体地，这些方法是基于由具有单层的网络表示的信息交换规则来设计的，在这些信息中，它们导致具有固定的，无变化的空间特性的多主体形成。对于有能力的代理人必须通过这些方法控制最终形成的情况，如果此类代理人具有全局信息交换能力，则他们通常可以这样做。但是，对于具有大量代理和低带宽对等通信的情况，全球信息交换不切实际。从这个角度出发，本文的目的是展示信息交换规则，可以将其设计成具有多层的网络（多重信息网络），以便实现空间演化的多主体形式。特别是，我们首先要考虑编队分配问题，然后是编队跟踪问题，并引入新的分布式控制体系结构，这些体系结构允许有能力的代理人在不需要全局信息交换能力的情况下在空间上改变所得编队的大小和方向。此外，还进一步利用了来自微分势场的工具和方法，以便针对地层跟踪问题推广提出的分布式控制架构，以实现实际应用中所需的连通性维护和避免碰撞。