Steering a Leader-Follower Team via Linear Consensus

The paper considers the problem of driving a formation of autonomous mobile agents. The group of mobile devices is described as a leader–follower network, where the followers update their position using a simple local consensus procedure, while the leaders, whose positions represent the control inputs of the network, are free to move. We characterize the transient behavior of the network, and solve the containment problem without relying on auxiliary sensors.