Distributed Leader Escort Control of Multi-agent Systems with Variable Topologies

This paper addresses the leader escort control problem of multi-agent systems and discusses how the agents can be effectively separated into two groups to move symmetrically around their leader. A distributed design is given to escort the moving leader under an undirected switching graph, based on a neighbor-based state-estimation rule to estimate the leader's state and a neighbor-based escort controller. With the help of graph theory, the problem can be solved, and related simulations are proposed for illustration.