Overview: Collective control of multi-agent systems

Collective control of amultiagent system is concerned with designing strategies for a group of autonomous agents operating in a networked environment. The aim is to achieve a global control objective through distributed sensing, communication, computing, and control. It has attracted many researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including the literature of automatic control. This paper aims to give a general framework that is able to accommodate many of these outcomes. Within this framework, the development on this topic is systematically reviewed and the representative outcomes can be sorted out from four aspects: 1) agent dynamics; 2) network topologies; 3) feedback and communication mechanisms; and 4) collective behaviors. Thus, the state-of-the-art approach and technology is described. Moreover, within this framework, further interesting and promising directions on this research topic are envisioned.