Formation Control and Rigidity Theory

Abstract

Formation control is one of the fundamental coordination tasks for teams of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous formations are used in applications ranging from search-and-rescue operations to deep space exploration, with benefits including increased robustness to failures and risk mitigation for human operators. The challenge of formation control is to develop distributed control strategies using vehicle onboard sensing that ensures the desired formation is obtained. This snapshot describes how the mathematical theory of rigidity has emerged as an important tool in the study of formation control problems.