Formation control of balloons: A block circulant approach

This paper focuses on control of a multiagent system of high-altitude balloons, and provides an efficient method to synthesize decentralized controllers for very large systems. Feedback laws are synthesized using a novel method which maintains the distributed structure in the balloon system: the balloons' geometry imposes a block circulant pattern in the system matrices, and the synthesis method guarantees that the feedback found will also be block circulant. The block circulant feedback has a clear method of decentralization, and this decentralized control can then be used on systems much larger than the one for which the feedback was initially designed. Simulations affirm that the response time is practically unchanged between the original system and the larger decentralized system, so the feedback is both robust and scalable.