Collision-free vehicle formation control under arbitrarily switching network topology

This paper is concerned with collision-free vehicle formation control when the inter-vehicle network topology is time-varying. Like typical collision-free formation control approaches, the proposed control approach involves two control phases: one for converging to a desired formation (no collision avoidance considered); the other for achieving collision avoidance. However, the proposed control approach has two distinctive features. First, the proposed control approach uses a fixed set of time-invariant control gains for achieving the desired formation but allows time-varying control gains only for avoiding collision. This feature lends itself well to the increase (and the decrease) of the controller´s reliability (and complexity) during the most of manoeuvring periods. Second, the proposed control approach provably works for time-varying network topologies. Theoretical and numerical evidences are provided to justify these two features.