Coordinated autonomous vehicle formations: decentralization, control synthesis and optimization

This paper describes a novel methodology for high-level control and coordination of autonomous vehicle formations and its demonstration on high fidelity models of the organic air vehicle developed at Honeywell Laboratories. The scheme employs decentralized receding horizon controllers that reside on each vehicle to achieve coordination among team members. An appropriate graph structure describes the underlying communication topology between the vehicles. On each vehicle, information about neighbors is used to predict their behavior so that conflict-free trajectories that maintain coordination and achieve team objectives result. When feasibility of the decentralized control is lost, collision avoidance is ensured by invoking emergency maneuvers that are computed via invariant set theory