Adaptive Switched Bipartite Time-Varying Formation Control for Multiagent Systems With Inaccessible Leader and Follower Information

This article investigates the leader-following bipartite time-varying formation (BTVF) control problem for switched multiagent systems (MASs) under the changeable directed signed topologies. The communication topology switches to obey an average dwell-time condition, capturing realistic network dynamics. Two critical challenges are addressed in the controller design, one of which is that the real states are inaccessible and the other is that we know nothing about the active leader input. These constraints significantly increase the design complexity. Against this backdrop, we develop a novel control protocol that is capable of achieving the BTVF tracking even given the uncertain leader input without using the real states. The designed control protocol can perform well to deliver reliable commands to realize the BTVF under switched topologies. Through Lyapunov stability analysis and recursive algorithms, we rigorously prove convergence to the desired BTVF. Notably, the protocol is also shown to guarantee bipartite consensus as a special case. In the end, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is validated through simulations involving the clusters of the wheeled mobile robot and autonomous aerial vehicle models in different working scenarios.