Decentralized cooperative-control design for multi-vehicle formations Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • In a decentralized, cooperative-control regime, individual vehicles autonomously compute their required control inputs to achieve a group objective. Controlling formations of individual vehicles is one application of decentralized cooperative control. In this paper, we develop cooperative-control schemes for a multi-vehicle formation problem with information flow modeled by leader-follower subsystems. Control laws are developed to drive position and velocity errors between vehicle pairs to zero. The general control law for the ith vehicle tracks its lead vehicle's position and velocity, as well as a reference position and velocity that the whole formation follows. We then develop rate-estimation schemes for the general control law using both Luenberger-observer and passive-filtering estimation methods. It is shown that these estimation methods are complicated by the effects that the estimated rates have on formation stability. Last, we present the development of a rate-free controller, which does not require state information from other vehicles in the formation. The control schemes are simulated for a five-vehicle formation and are compared for stability and formation convergence.

published proceedings

  • Collection of Technical Papers - AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference 2007

author list (cited authors)

  • Weitz, L. A., Hurtado, J. E., & Sinclair, A. J.

complete list of authors

  • Weitz, LA||Hurtado, JE||Sinclair, AJ

publication date

  • December 2007