Flocking of Multi-Agents With a Virtual Leader

All agents being informed and the virtual leader traveling at a constant velocity are the two critical assumptions seen in the recent literature on flocking in multi-agent systems. Under these assumptions, Olfati-Saber in a recent IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control paper proposed a flocking algorithm which by incorporating a navigational feedback enables a group of agents to track a virtual leader. This paper revisits the problem of multi-agent flocking in the absence of the above two assumptions. We first show that, even when only a fraction of agents are informed, the Olfati-Saber flocking algorithm still enables all the informed agents to move with the desired constant velocity, and an uninformed agent…