Abstract: “Formation control of multi-vehicle system has been studied as a combination of estimation problem and tracking problem. Virtual structure based formation control strategy is applied which solves the problem of formation maintenance and movement using a control architecture in hierarchical manner. The control architecture is distributed in nature and requires only local neighbor to neighbor communication which consists of three layers: formation state estimator, formation control module and the physical agent. In particular, a PID-like discrete-time consensus algorithm is applied on group level to estimate the time varying group trajectory information. Based on the estimated group trajectory information, a PID-like discrete-time consensus algorithm based tracking controller is applied on vehicle level. Numerical solution presented in the end, verifies the effectiveness of proposed approach.”

Keywords: formation control, consensus, virtual structure, multi-vehicle system