  Most of the existing formation algorithms for multiagent systems are fully
label-specified, i.e., the desired position for each agent in the formation is
uniquely determined by its label, which would inevitably make the formation
algorithms vulnerable to agent failures. To address this issue, in this paper,
we propose a dynamic leader-follower approach to solving the line marching
problem for a swarm of planar kinematic robots. In contrast to the existing
results, the desired positions for the robots in the line are not fully
label-specified, but determined in a dynamic way according to the current state
of the robot swarm. By constantly forming a chain of leader-follower pairs,
exact formation can be achieved by pairwise leader-following tracking. Since
the order of the chain of leader-follower pairs is constantly updated, the
proposed algorithm shows strong robustness against robot failures.
Comprehensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the
proposed algorithm.
