Communication Resources for Disturbance Rejection in Coordinated Vehicle Control

This paper studies the systematic analysis of communication requirements associated with vehicle formation control performance. Our study begins with a linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control strategy for the disturbance rejection of vehicles in a formation. Then we analyze the relationship between the controlled spatial state covariance of the closed-loop LQG system and the formation geometry. This analysis clarifies the criterion for including communication between the vehicles. A simple numerical example is given to explain the main ideas and some interesting design issues