Connectivity Preserving Formation Stabilization in an Obstacle-Cluttered Environment in the Presence of Time-Varying Communication Delays

This technical article addresses the formation stabilization problem for multiagent systems (MASs) composed of dynamical agents moving within an obstacle-cluttered environment and sharing information via nonideal wireless communication networks. A novel distributed cooperative navigation function based control strategy is proposed, which drives the MAS to a desired formation without any collision while counteracting the presence of unavoidable communication impairments originated by the wireless network. By recasting the formation stabilization problem into a consensus one and by combining the Lyapunov stability theory with Halanay's lemma, uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the whole delayed closed-loop system is proved. In the special case of an obstacle-free environment, our approach guarantees exponential stability of the closed-loop networked system. The stability analysis also provides an estimation of the delay upper bound and allows to evaluate the stability margins with respect to the latencies that can be observed in practical application scenarios. Theoretical derivations are verified through nontrivial simulations.