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Summary: This article presents a novel control strategy based on predictor‐feedback delay compensation for multiagent systems to reach a prescribed target formation under unknown but bounded communication delays and switching communication topology. Both communication delays and network topology can be subjected to arbitrarily‐fast time variations. The key idea is to implement predictor‐feedback strategies using only relative measurements between agents expressed in each local agent's frame, with the aim to counteract the negative effect of time delays. Nevertheless, due to the decentralized nature of the control, the presence of time‐varying delays and switching communication topology, only partial delay compensation is possible. Despite this, we show that better performance can be achieved with our proposal with respect to nonpredictor control schemes by introducing a weighting factor for predictor‐feedback terms in the control law. Sufficient conditions based on Linear Matrix Inequalities for robust stability are also provided, which allow to easily design the controller parameters in order to maximize the speed of convergence. Finally, simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates new coordinate-free formation control strategies of multi-agent systems to overcome the negative effects of time delays. To this end, we present a single predictor-feedback scheme to compensate the multiple communication delays, assumed to be unknown but bounded and arbitrarily-fast time-varying. Although delays cannot exactly be compensated due to time-varying delay mismatches, the trade-off between robustness and convergence speed can be notably improved if the control gain is suitably designed. Hence, with the objective of enlarging the time-varying delay interval for a given convergence speed, an LMI-based iterative algorithm is presented to solve the control gain synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]