Collision-free Source Seeking and Flocking Control of Multi-agents with Connectivity Preservation

We present a distributed source-seeking and flocking control method for networked multi-agent systems with non-holonomic constraints. Based solely on identical on-board sensor systems, which measure the source local field, the group objective is attained by appointing a leader agent to seek the source while the remaining follower agents form a cohesive flocking with their neighbors using a distributed flocking control law in a connectivity-preserved undirected network. To guarantee the safe separation and group motion for all agents and to solve the conflicts with the "cohesion" flocking rule of Reynolds, the distributed control algorithm is solved individually through quadratic-programming optimization problem with constraints, which guarantees the inter-agent collision avoidance and connectivity preservation. Stability analysis of the closed-loop system is presented and the efficacy of the methods is shown in simulation results.