What is Multi-Vehicle Formation

Swarm coordination and formation control designs focus on multi-agent dynamic system behavior and aim to achieve desired coordinated behavior or predefined geometric shape. They utilize techniques from the control theory and graph theory literature. On the other hand, adaptive control theory is concerned with uncertainties in the system dynamics, and has structured frameworks for various types of plant models. Therefore, in case there are uncertainties in the swarm dynamics, adaptive control methodologies can be utilized to achieve the desired coordinated behavior and there exist remarkable works in this direction. However, connection among swarm coordination, formation control, and adaptive control theory brings some restrictions as well as advantages. Hence adaptive swarm coordination and formation control has been developed in limited aspects. In this chapter, we review some existing works of the adaptive formation control literature along with non-adaptive ones, and discuss the advantages of application of adaptive control frameworks to swarm coordination and formation control.