Decentralized consensus based control methodology for vehicle formations in air and deep space

In this paper a new methodology is proposed for decentralized overlapping tracking control of autonomous vehicles in air and deep-space. The methodology is based on the application of recently proposed decentralized consensus-based state estimators in conjunction with the globally LQ optimal state feedback control law. In the case of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a specific formation model is proposed and the globally optimal control law derived using an aggregation of the formation model. It is demonstrated experimentally that the whole control scheme is advantageous over similar decentralized control algorithms. In the case of deep-space formations, it is shown that a decentralized consensus based estimator can be constructed using specific nonsingular transformations from one realization of the observable part of the formation model to another. Experimental results demonstrate excellent properties of a control scheme based on this estimator in the case of a small number of available measurements.