Connectivity enhancing coordinated tracking control of multi-agent systems with a state-dependent jointly-connected dynamic interaction topology

We revisit the problem of virtual leader tracking by a group of agents of second order dynamics when only a portion of the agents are informed of the information of the virtual leader, under a state-dependent interaction topology. By proposing a simpler controller structure, we obtain results on coordinated tracking control under a jointly connected topology, both in the presence and in the absence of the virtual leader velocity information. The simplification in control protocols also enables us to arrive at our second contribution on connectivity enhancing coordinated control. In comparison with the existing connectivity preserving control algorithms, our proposed connectivity enhancing mechanism is effective in maintaining both the initially existent topology edges and those newly formed topology edges that were not initially existent. Besides, our proposed algorithms are designed in such a way that the local Lipschitz condition is satisfied and thus technical issues on solution uniqueness of the closed-loop system are avoided. Our proposed technique applies to both consensus tracking and flocking.