Formation tracking of multi-vehicle systems in unknown environments using a multi-region control scheme

In this paper, a multi-region control scheme is proposed for a formation of nonholonomic vehicles to track a reference trajectory while avoiding collisions and preserving network connectivity in unknown environments. The proposed control scheme defines three regions, safe region, dangerous region and transition region. In different regions, priority is given to different control objectives. In safe region where trajectory tracking holds the priority, the proposed control scheme guarantees bounded tracking of the reference trajectory for each vehicle. In dangerous region where avoidance control is the main objective, a new bounded potential function is designed to characterise constraints of obstacle and inter-vehicle collision avoidance as well as connectivity maintenance. By introducing a series of transition functions, smooth switching between trajectory tracking and avoidance control is achieved in transition region. It has been proved that each vehicle can track its reference trajectory while satisfying the constraints simultaneously with a bounded controller which means that the proposed control scheme satisfies input constraints by properly tuning parameters. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.