Multicluster Design and Control of Large-Scale Affine Formations

Abstract: Conventional affine formation control (AFC) empowers a network of agents with flexible but collective motions - a potential which has not yet been exploited for large-scale swarms. One of the key bottlenecks lies in the design of an interaction graph, characterized by the Laplacian-like stress matrix. Efficient and scalable design solutions often yield suboptimal solutions on various performance metrics, e.g., convergence speed and communication cost, to name a few. The current state-of-the-art algorithms for finding optimal solutions are computationally expensive and therefore not scalable. In this work, we propose a more efficient optimal design for any generic configuration, with the potential to further reduce complexity for a large class of nongeneric rotationally symmetric configurations. Furthermore, we introduce a multicluster control framework that offers an additional scalability improvement, enabling not only collective affine motions as in conventional AFC but also partially independent motions naturally desired for large-scale swarms. The overall design is compatible with a swarm size of several hundred agents with fast formation convergence, as compared to up to only a few dozen agents by existing methods. Experimentally, we benchmark the performance of our algorithm compared with several state-of-the-art solutions and demonstrate the capabilities of our proposed control strategies.