Formation Control of Multi-Agent Systems for Urban Earthquake Disasters: Model Predictive Control Approach

A formation control framework of multi-agent systems for urban earthquake disasters is proposed. Specifically, we aim for the search for severed roads on the area damaged by the earthquakes. Given the graph that consists of edges and nodes that correspond to roads and intersections, respectively, we cast the problem as a variation of Chinese postman problem (CPP). The purpose of the mission is that the agents search all the edges on the graph and determine whether the edges are severed. To achieve this objective, we employ the model predictive control approach to find which way each agent should follow on-line.