Guaranteed estimation and distributed control of vehicle formations

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed set-membership estimation and formation control algorithm for a fleet of vehicles. Each vehicle is equipped with an agent with sensing, acting, computational and communication capacities. The agent's objective is to compute estimation set for the state of all the fleet of vehicles and, additionally, generate control actions to keep its local vehicle in formation. In order to improve the estimation, the agents exchange information with other neighbouring agents. The estimation sets are mathematically characterised by zonotopes. The novelty of the proposed solution lies in the fact that the estimation is guaranteed in spite of the lack of knowledge of the control signal applied by the rest of vehicles. Then, in the presence of bounded disturbances and noises, the position reference for the vehicles can be tracked with a bounded estimation. The proposed solution is tested by simulations.

Keywords:

• Distributed estimation and control
• fleet of vehicles
• guaranteed estimation
• zonotopes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The estimation and control algorithm presented in the next section is still valid if vehicles with different dynamics are considered. For the matter of simplicity in the notation, we consider the case of equivalent vehicles.

2 The image of the vehicle is obtained from the url: http://i-hls.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Autonomous-Underwater-Vehicle-AUV-Aselsan.jpg

Additional information

Funding

L. Orihuela and P. Millán have been supported by grant TEC2016-80242-P founded by AEI/FEDER through the Laboratorio de Simulación hardware-in-the-loop de Sistemas Ciberfísicos (LaSSiC). R.A. García has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 789051).