Observer-Based Distributed Time-Varying Group Formation Control for Heterogeneous Linear Systems under Directed Topology

This paper investigates the time-varying group formation problem for heterogeneous linear systems under directed interaction topology from an observer viewpoint. Considering the situation where there have multiple time-varying sub-formations and all agents can only access their output measurements directly, an observer-based distributed protocol is proposed for each agent to achieve the time-varying group formation where the observers are constructed to estimate the unmeasurable states. It is shown that the time-varying group formation control problem can be solved by selecting sufficiently large intra-group coupling gains if the communication topology of each subgroup has a spanning tree. Finally, simulation demonstrate the results.