Decentralized control for formation of autonomous vehicles

This paper deals with the consensus problem and formation problem of the mobile automated vehicles (or agent/s). It provides a theoretical framework for analysis of consensus algorithms for multi-agent networked systems with an emphasis on the role of directed information flow and performance analysis for the algorithm provided. In this paper, the vehicles exchange information according to a pre-specified communication digraph based on the position of the vehicles is considered. Also, the paper investigates a method for decentralized stabilization of vehicle formations. A feedback control is designed using relative information between a vehicle and its in-neighbors in digraph. A necessary and sufficient condition is derived for an appropriate decentralized linear stabilizing feedback to exist for digraph that is a rooted directed spanning tree. This study shows the direct relationship between the rate of convergence to formation and the eigenvalues of the (directed) Laplacian of digraph. The framework of this paper is based on tools from matrix theory, algebraic graph theory, and control theory