Reconfiguration of a vehicle formation with ring communication structure
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2016 EUCA. In multiple vehicle formations, there is often a need to reconfigure communication graphs to accommodate (1) for addition or removal of vehicles or (2) for change in positions of the vehicles within a given formation. This problem is commonly referred to as the topology or graph reconfiguration problem. In this paper, we will study the reconfiguration problem from the point of view of increasing the size of the formation. We first discuss the suitability of the ring structure to add vehicles into the formation followed by ways to reconfigure the communication structure when adding vehicles. We will show that the directed ring graph is well suited for adding vehicles from the point of view of scalability of the existing controller and the ease with which the existing ring structure will be able to handle the increase in the formation size. The algorithm for obtaining the ring structure is formulated as a specific instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem, where constraints may be included to model the communication sensing range; in addition, we use the nearest neighbor search to include new vehicles into the perimeter of the formation.