3 Fundamental Formation Control
In this chapter, we offer a comprehensive treatment of various formation control topics. Most topics covered relate to our own research work, with the addition of some other relevant studies for completeness. The topics involved are:
- velocity synchronization
- synchronized tracking
- formation control.
3.1 Unified Problem Description
In this section, we first give the definitions of several key concepts associated with formation control, considering a general multi‐vehicle system (MVS) model. These definitions also apply to formation control when there are heterogeneous vehicles, but we will not dwell on this area. To help the reader understand the concepts involved, we take an MVS with dynamics modeled by 
normalized double integrators as an illustrative example.
3.1.1 Some Key Definitions for Formation Control
Consider an MVS consisting of 
vehicles with an interaction topology 
, and treat each vehicle as a node in 
. The dynamics of each vehicle are described by
where , are the states, are the control inputs, are the ...
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