Exploiting Over-The-Air Consensus for Collision Avoidance and Formation Control in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a distributed control method for multi-agent robotic systems employing Over the Air Consensus (OtA-Consensus). Designed for agents with decoupled single-integrator dynamics, this approach aims at efficient formation achievement and collision avoidance. As a distinctive feature, it leverages OtA’s ability to exploit interference in wireless channels, a property traditionally considered a drawback, thus enhancing communication efficiency among robots. An analytical proof of asymptotic convergence is established for systems with time-varying communication topologies represented by sequences of strongly connected directed graphs. Comparative evaluations demonstrate significant efficiency improvements over current state-of-the-art methods, especially in scenarios with a large number of agents.