Consensus Control of Multi-Agent System with Virtual Agents Considering Obstacle Avoidance

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system whose overall behavior is determined by local interactions among multiple autonomous agents. Recently, research has been conducted on the application of MASs in real-world environments, in which the agents are assumed to be robots that drive on the ground, i.e., autonomous mobile robots, and acquire external environmental information using cameras. In such cases, the information that can be obtained by the agent is limited to the field of view (FOV) of the respective camera, and the overall graph structure is dynamic and time varying. In addition, because the FOV may be obstructed by obstacles during camera measurements, obstacle avoidance must be considered. In this study, we examined the MAS consensus problem considering the effects of a limited FOV obstructed by obstacles. Specifically, we propose a control method using virtual agents that considers obstacle avoidance based on funnel control. In addition, simulation study was performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for solving the MAS consensus problem in an environment with obstacles.