Synthesis of Distributed Control of Coordinated Path Following Based on Hybrid Approach

The coordinated path following problem, steering a fleet of unicycles along a path while achieving a desired inter-vehicle formation, is investigated. The path is a paved road in the world or a marked curve on the floor of work area, for which each vehicle can measure the distance to the path and the heading error as well as the curvature of the path segment in its sensing range. Moreover, the vehicles can measure the arc distances of their neighbors that lie in their sensing range. A hybrid control approach is proposed to solve the problem. Depending on the posture with respect to the partly observed path, each vehicle either interacts with one of the others or works at the single-agent level. It is shown that the path following error of each vehicle is eventually reduced to zero and vehicles of every weakly connected component asymptotically converge to formations with equal arc distances.