Controlling rigid formations for multi-agent systems

It is of increasing interest to study the merging of rigid formations using the tools from rigidity graph theory and control theory due to the growing wide applications of teams of autonomous vehicles and smart robots. The possible sensedor communicated data of the agents are in the form of local information about the relative positions, distances and bearing angles of the focal agent's neighboring peers. Thus the challenge is how to design distributed cooperative control strategies, usinglocal information, to maneuver the overall rigid formation as a whole to track a given trajectory or monitor an area of interest.