Distributed cooperative control and collision avoidance for multiple kinematic agents

This paper contains two main contributions: (i) a provably correct distributed control strategy for collision avoidance and convergence of multiple holonomic agents to a desired feasible formation configuration and (ii) a connection between formation infeasibility and flocking behavior in holonomic kinematic multi-agent systems. In particular, it is shown that when inter-agent formation objectives cannot occur simultaneously in the state-space then, under certain assumptions, the agents velocity vectors and orientations converge to a common value at steady state, under the same control strategy that would lead to a feasible formation. Convergence guarantees are provided in both cases using tools from algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov analysis.