Formation control of multiple elliptic agents with limited sensing ranges

This paper presents a design of cooperative controllers that force a group of N mobile agents with an elliptic shape and limited sensing ranges to perform a desired formation and that guarantee no collisions between any agents in the group. The desired formation can be stabilized at feasible reference trajectories with bounded time derivatives. The formation control design is based on explicit algebraic separation conditions between ellipses, root conditions of cubic polynomials, the Lyapunov direct method, and smooth or p‐times differentiable step functions. These functions are incorporated into novel potential functions to solve the collision avoidance problem without the need for switchings despite the agents' limited sensing ranges. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Bounded Controllers for Formation Stabilization of Mobile Agents With Limited Sensing Ranges

A constructive method is presented to design bounded cooperative controllers that force a group of N mobile agents with limited sensing ranges to stabilize at a desired location, and guarantee no collisions between the agents. The control development is based on new general potential functions, which attain the minimum value when the desired formation is achieved, and are equal to infinity when a collision occurs. A p-times differential bump function is introduced and embedded into the potential functions to deal with the agent limited sensing ranges. An alternative to Barbalat's lemma is developed to analyze stability of the closed loop system. Extension to formation tracking is also addressed     

Practical formation control of multiple underactuated ships with limited sensing ranges

This paper presents a constructive method to design cooperative controllers that force a group of N underactuated ships with limited sensing ranges to perform a desired formation, and guarantee no collisions between the ships. These ships do not have an independent actuator in the sway axis. The desired formation is stabilized at any sufficiently smooth reference trajectories, including fixed points and nonadmissible trajectories for the ships. The formation control design is based on several nonlinear coordinate changes, the transverse function approach, the backstepping technique, the Lyapunov direct method, and smooth and p-times differentiable step functions. These functions are introduced and incorporated into novel potential functions to solve the collision avoidance problem without the need of switchings despite the ships’ limited sensing ranges. Simulations illustrate the results.     

Formation control of underactuated ships with elliptical shape approximation and limited communication ranges

Based on the recent theoretical development for formation control of multiple fully actuated agents with an elliptical shape in Do (2012), this paper develops distributed controllers that force a group of $N$ underactuated ships with limited communication ranges to perform a desired formation, and guarantee no collisions between any ships in the group. The ships are first fitted to elliptical disks for solving collision avoidance. A coordinate transformation is then proposed to introduce an additional control input, which overcomes difficulties caused by underactuation and off-diagonal terms in the system matrices. The control design relies on potential functions with the separation condition between elliptical disks and the smooth or $p$-times differentiable step functions embedded in.     

Practical Formation Control of Multiple Unicycle-Type Mobile Robots with Limited Sensing Ranges

This paper presents a design of cooperative controllers that force a group of N unicycle-type mobile robots with limited sensing ranges to perform a desired tight formation and that guarantee no collisions between any robots in the group. The desired formation can be stabilized at any reference trajectories with bounded time derivatives. The formation control design is based on several nonlinear coordinate changes, the transverse function approach, the backstepping technique, the Lyapunov direct method, and smooth or p −times differentiable step functions. These functions are introduced and incorporated into novel potential functions to solve the collision avoidance problem without the need of switchings despite of the robots’ limited sensing ranges. The proposed formation control system is applied to solve a gradient climbing problem.     

Relative formation control of mobile agents for gradient climbing and target capturing

Cooperative controllers are designed to force a group of N mobile agents with limited communication using only relative position between the agents to form a desired formation structure. The centre of the formation structure is the mean position of all the agents. The agents are stabilised at desired positions with respect to the centre of the structure. The proposed controllers also preserve initial communication connectivity and guarantees no collisions between the agents. The control design is based on smooth step functions and potential functions. The proposed control design is applied to solve gradient climbing and target capturing problems in both two- and three-dimensional spaces. The gradient average of a distributed field in nature or artificially generated by a target is first estimated over a bounded region using the field measurement by the agents. The gradient average is then used as the reference velocity to guide the agents.     

Formation and obstacle avoidance control for multiagent systems

This paper considers the problems of formation and obstacle avoidance for multiagent systems.The objective is to design a term of agents that can reach a desired formation while avoiding collision with obstacles.To reduce the amount of information interaction between agents and target,we adopt the leader-follower formation strategy.By using the receding horizon control (RHC),an optimal problem is formulated in terms of cost minimization under constraints.Information on obstacles is incorporated online as sensed in a limited sensing range.The communication requirements between agents are that the followers should obtain the previous optimal control trajectory of the leader to each update time.The stability is guaranteed by adding a terminal-state penalty to the cost function and a terminal-state region to optimal problem.Finally,simulation studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Cooperative control for target-capturing task based on a cyclic pursuit strategy

This paper studies a methodology for group coordination and cooperative control of n agents to achieve a target-capturing task in 3D space. The proposed approach is based on a cyclic pursuit strategy, where agent i simply pursues agent i+1 modulo n. The distinctive features of the proposed method are as follows. First, no communication mechanism between agents is necessary and thus it is inherently a distributed control strategy. Also, it is a simple robust memoryless control scheme which has self-stability property. Finally, it guarantees a global convergence of all agents to the desired formation. Further, it is also guaranteed that no collision occurs. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method and the achievement of a desired pursuit pattern in 3D space.     

Adaptive Neural Region Tracking Control of Multi-fully Actuated Ocean Surface Vessels

In this paper, adaptive neural network region tracking control is designed to force a group of fully actuated ocean vessels with limited sensing range to track a common moving target region, in the presence of uncertainties and unknown disturbances. In this control concept, the desired objective is specified as a moving region instead of a stationary point, region or a path. The controllers guarantee the connectivity preservation of the dynamic interaction network, and no collisions happen between any ocean vessels in the group. The tracking control design is based on the artificial potential functions, approximation-based backstepping design technique, and Lyapunov's method. It is proved that under the adaptive neural network control law, the tracking error of each ocean vessel converges to an adjustable neighborhood of the origin, although some of them do not access the desired target region directly. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.      

Connectivity Preserving Flocking without Velocity Measurement

In this paper, we address the design of a decentralized controller for connectivity‐preserving flocking, where each agent only can access to the position information of the agents within its sensing zone. An output vector, based on the position information alone, is constructed to replace the role of velocity, and some bounded attractive and repulsive forces are integrated together to design the controller. We prove that the controller not only synchronizes all agents in a stable formation, but also enables collision avoidance and connectivity preserving all of the time, when the initial condition meets certain requirements. Moreover, a leader‐follower method is used to guide the group to a desired direction, where the followers can sense the leader only if the distance between them is less than the communication radius.     

Coordination of multi-agent Euler–Lagrange systems via energy-shaping: Networking improves robustness

In this paper, the robust coordination of multi-agent systems via energy-shaping is studied. The agents are nonidentical, Euler–Lagrange systems with uncertain parameters which are regulated (with and without exchange of information between the agents) by the classical energy-based controller where the potential energy function is shaped such that, if the parameters are known, all agents converge globally to the same desired constant equilibrium. Under parameter uncertainty, the globally asymptotically stable (GAS) equilibrium point is shifted away from its desired value and this paper shows that adding information exchange between the agents to the decentralized control policy improves the steady-state performance. More precisely, it proves that if the undirected communication graph is connected, the equilibrium of the networked controller is always closer (in a suitable metric) to the desired one than that of the decentralized controller. The result holds for all interconnection gains if the potential energy functions are quadratic, else, it is true for sufficiently large gains. An additional advantage of networking is that the asymptotic stabilization objective can be achieved by using lower gains into the loop. Some experimental results (using two nonlinear manipulators) given support to the main results of the paper.     

Automatic lateral emergency collision avoidance for a passenger car

Longitudinal collision avoidance controllers are of limited benefit for preventing head-on collisions between road vehicles travelling at high speed or for preventing rear end collisions when there is insufficient separation between the vehicles. In these circumstances, aggressive lateral vehicle manoeuvres are more appropriate. This paper develops a controller architecture to perform an emergency lateral collision avoidance manoeuvre. Simulation results indicate significant improvements in collision avoidance at vehicle speeds up to 100 [km/hr] using integrated automatic steering and braking.     

Adaptive Behaviors in Autonomous Navigation with Collision Avoidance and Bounded Velocity of an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

Integration of Control Theory and Genetic Programming paradigm toward development a family of controllers is addressed in this paper. These controllers are applied for autonomous navigation with collision avoidance and bounded velocity of an omnidirectional mobile robot. We introduce the concepts of natural and adaptive behaviors to relate each control objective with a desired behavior for the mobile robot. Natural behaviors lead the system to fulfill a task inherently. In this work, the motion of the mobile robot to achieve desired position, ensured by applying a Control-Theory-based controller, defines the natural behavior. The adaptive behavior, learned through Genetic-Programming, fits the robot motion in order to avoid collision with an obstacle while fulfilling velocity constraints. Hence, the behavior of the mobile robot is the addition of the natural and the adaptive behaviors. Our proposed methodology achieves the discovery of 9402 behaviors without collisions where asymptotic convergence to desired goal position is demonstrated by Lyapunov stability theory. Effectiveness of proposed framework is illustrated through a comparison between experiments and numerical simulations for a real mobile robot.     

Robot formation control in stealth mode with scalable team size

In situations where robots need to keep electromagnetic silent in a formation, communication channels become unavailable. Moreover, as passive displacement sensors are used, limited sensing ranges are inevitable due to power insufficiency and limited noise reduction. To address the formation control problem for a scalable team of robots subject to the above restrictions, a flexible strategy is necessary. In this paper, under the assumption that the data transmission among the robots is not available, a novel controller and a protocol are designed that do not rely on communication. As the controller only drives the robots to a partially desired formation, a distributed coordination protocol is proposed to resolve the imperfections. It is shown that the effectiveness of the controller and the protocol rely on the formation connectivity, and a condition is given on the sensing range. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the feasibility and advantages of the new design scheme developed.     

MIMO型RFID的传感标签盲源分离防碰撞算法

针对传感标签密集的多输入多输出型射频识别(MIMO-RFID)系统中标签同时响应导致一系列的碰撞问题,提出了一种并行识别传感标签的欠定盲分离的防碰撞算法(BFast-ICA).在快速独立分量分析(Fast-ICA)算法的基础上,采用更高阶次的迭代方法,实现碰撞传感标签信号的欠定盲分离.在分离性能和吞吐量两个方面进行性能仿真,实验结果表明:改进的防碰撞算法能够更快地分离传感标签信号;在阅读器天线数目相同的情况下,最大吞吐量比当前的盲分离标签防碰撞算法提高了40％以上.     

A backstepping design for directed formation control of three‐coleader agents in the plane

This paper deals with a directed formation control problem of three agents moving in the plane, where the agents have a cyclic ordering with each one required to maintain a nominated distance from its neighbor, and each agent is described by a double integrator. Firstly, a directed formation control law based on the knowledge only of the neighbor's direction is designed by using the integrator backstepping technique, which can not only accomplish the desired triangle formation but also ensure that speeds of all agents converge to a common value without collision between each other during the motion. Then, with the purpose of relaxing and even overcoming the restriction of initial conditions of the agents owing to collision avoidance, we introduce the inter‐agent potential functions into the design. The convergence of the proposed control algorithms is proved by using tools from LaSalle's invariance principle. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the control laws. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Avoiding the local-minimum problem in multi-agent systems with limited sensing and communication

In this paper, we consider a control problem for nonholonomic multi-agent systems in which agents and obstacles operate within a circular-shaped work area. We assume that agents only have limited sensing and communication ranges. We propose a novel control scheme using potential functions that drives agents from the initial to the goal configuration while avoiding collision with other agents, obstacles, and the boundary of the work area. The control scheme employs an avoidance strategy that ensures that the agents are never trapped at local minima that are typically encountered with most potential function-based approaches. A numerical simulation is presented to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.     

Simultaneous Stability of Large-scale Systems via Distributed Control Network with Partial Information Exchange

This paper is concerned with the simultaneous stability of the multi-mode large-scale systems composed of the interaction subsystems. A novel distributed control network consisting of multiple network-based controllers with the partial information exchange is adopted to simultaneously stabilize the large-scale systems in multiple operation modes. In the distributed control network (DCN), a partial state information exchange approach is developed to save the real-time communication and computation resources. To compensate for the effects of dynamic couplings between interaction subsystems, the designed controllers use both the local states and the neighbors’ partial information with packet dropouts for local feedback design. Then, a series of Lyapunov functions are constructed to derive a matrix-inequality-based sufficient condition for the existence of the desired controllers. Based on an orthogonal complement technique, the gains of the controllers in DCN are parameterized. The iterative algorithm for the solution of simultaneous stabilization problem is also developed. Finally, a numerical example is performed to show the relevant feature of the proposed method.