A PASSIVITY-BASED APPROACH TO DEPLOYMENT IN MULTI-AGENT NETWORKS

Surveillance and convoy tracking applications often require groups of networked agents for redundancy and better coverage. An important goal upon deployment is to establish a formation around a target. Although there exist distributed algorithms using only local communication that achieve this goal, they typically ignore destabilizing effects resulting from implementation uncertainties, such as network delays and data loss. This paper resolves these issues by introducing a discrete-time distributed design framework that uses a compositional, passivity-based approach to ensure l(2)(m)-stabilityregardless of overlay network topology, in the presence of network delays and data loss. For the restricted case of a uniform node degree in the overlay network topology, the paper shows that asymptotic formation establishment is achieved. Finally, simulations of velocity-limited unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are presented that demonstrate the robustness of the network architecture to network delays and data loss.