Decoupled Dynamics Distributed Control for Strings of Nonlinear Autonomous Agents

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, decentralized control architecture for nonlinear agents in a string formation, ensuring collision avoidance, trajectory tracking, and topology preservation, with robustness to delays and independence from network size.

Contribution

It introduces a decoupled, distributed control scheme for heterogeneous nonlinear agents that guarantees formation stability and collision avoidance regardless of network size or agent position.

Findings

Performance is independent of the number of agents.

The control scheme guarantees collision avoidance and formation tracking.

The approach is robust to communication delays.

Abstract

We introduce a distributed control architecture for a class of heterogeneous, nonlinear dynamical agents moving in the "string" formation, while guaranteeing trajectory tracking, collision avoidance and the preservation of the formation's topology. Each autonomous agent uses information and relative measurements only with respect to its predecessor in the string. The performance of the scheme is independent of the number of agents in the network and also on the agent's relative position in the network. The scalability is a consequence of the "decoupling" of a certain bounded approximation of the closed--loop equations, which allows the regulation and controller design (at each agent) to be done individually, in a completely decentralized manner. A practical method for compensating communication induced delays is also presented. Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness and the main features of the proposed approach.