Distributed formation control of networked mechanical systems

Abstract: This paper investigates a distributed formation tracking control law for large-scale networks of mechanical systems. In particular, the formation network is represented by a directed communication graph with leaders and followers, where each agent is described as a port-Hamiltonian system with a constant mass matrix. Moreover, we adopt a distributed parameter approach to prove the scalable asymptotic stability of the network formation, i.e., the scalability with respect to the network size and the specific formation preservation. A simulation case illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.