Formation Control for Thermal Multi-agent Systems

Inspired by the consensus theory applied to thermodynamic systems, this paper proposes an extension to create a temperature-based formation scheme. A group of thermal agents is modeled as first-order linear systems with a predefined communication topology. Then, a control strategy is designed to converge to a desired formation pattern which imposes the inter-agent relative temperatures obtained from a numerical solution of the Poisson's Heat Equation. The performance of the approach is evaluated by numerical simulations and an experimental setup composed by three flexible thermoelectric devices which converge exponentially in a group behaviour to its relative temperature offsets.