INFORMATION FLOW AND COOPERATIVE CONTROL OF VEHICLE FORMATIONS

https://doi.org/10.3182/20020721-6-ES-1901.00100Get rights and content

Abstract

Vehicles in formation often lack global information regarding the state of all the vehicles, a deficiency which can lead to instability and poor performance. In this paper, we demonstrate how exchange of minimal amounts of information between vehicles can be designed to realize a dynamical system which supplies each vehicle with a shared reference trajectory. When the information flow law is placed in the control loop, a separation principle is proven which guarantees stability of the formation and convergence of the information flow law regardless of the information flow topology.

Keywords

decentralized control
graph theory
vehicles

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1

Research supported in part by AFOSR grants F49620-99-1-0190 and F49620-01-1-0460. First author also supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an ARCS Foundation Fellowship. Address correspondence

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