A key problem in the formation control of homogeneous multiagent systems is the collision-free convergence of the agent positions into a desired formation. It is a typical NP-hard problem by considering the problem as optimizing the assignment of multiple destinations to the same number of agents deployed in an open space. It becomes even harder if the collision avoidance is required during the motion of agents, and thus, a suboptimal but efficient solution is adequate. The traditional methods make it by accurate preplanning of the motion trajectory of each single agent, or simply letting them reach an equilibrium as a tradeoff between the collision avoidance and the desired formation. In this article, a distributed control algorithm embedded with an assignment switch scheme is proposed to guarantee that the asymptotic convergence to the desired formation is achieved with no collisions between agents. By the proposed algorithm, the agents keep moving in straight lines toward their respective destinations until they are going to collide if they do not stop, at which moment the agents will communicate their information locally to switch their destination assignments so that they will continue to move in different directions and avoid potential collisions. Distributed control rules are also defined to confine the motion space of each agent for collision avoidance. It has been rigorously proven that the positions of all agents converge to the desired formation with no collision under random initial deployment. In addition, a detailed parameter design procedure is provided for both setting and controlling of the formation. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations and actual experiments in the outdoor environment are implemented and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

中文翻译：

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具有碰撞避免的收敛多智能体编队控制

同构多智能体系统的编队控制中的一个关键问题是智能体位置的无碰撞收敛到所需的编队。这是一个典型的 NP-hard 问题，将问题视为优化将多个目的地分配给部署在开放空间中的相同数量的代理。如果在代理运动期间需要避免碰撞，则变得更加困难，因此，一个次优但有效的解决方案就足够了。传统方法通过准确预先规划每个单个代理的运动轨迹，或者简单地让它们达到平衡作为避免碰撞和所需编队之间的权衡来实现。在本文中，提出了一种嵌入分配切换方案的分布式控制算法，以保证在代理之间不发生冲突的情况下实现对所需编队的渐近收敛。通过所提出的算法，代理继续沿直线向各自的目的地移动，直到如果他们不停止就会发生碰撞，此时代理将在本地传达他们的信息以切换他们的目的地分配，以便他们继续移动在不同的方向，避免潜在的碰撞。还定义了分布式控制规则来限制每个代理的运动空间以避免碰撞。已经严格证明，在随机初始部署下，所有代理的位置都会收敛到所需的编队，而不会发生碰撞。此外，为地层的设置和控制提供了详细的参数设计程序。最后，在室外环境中进行了蒙特卡罗模拟和实际实验，结果验证了所提出算法的有效性。