Dan Martinec

Ivo Herman, Dan Martinec, Zdeněk Hurák et al.

We consider platoons composed of identical vehicles and controlled in a distributed way, that is, each vehicle has its own onboard controller. The regulation errors in spacing to the immediately preceeding and following vehicles are weighted differently by the onboard controller, which thus implements an asymmetric bidirectional control scheme. The weights can vary along the platoon. We prove that such platoons have a nonzero uniform bound on the second smallest eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian matrix - the Fiedler eigenvalue. Furthermore, it is shown that existence of this bound always signals undesirable scaling properties of the platoon. Namely, the H-infinity norm of the transfer function of the platoon grows exponentially with the number of vehicles regardless of the controllers used. Hence the benefits of a uniform gap in the spectrum of a Laplacian with an asymetric distributed controller are paid for by poor scaling as the number of vehicles grows.

Dan Martinec, Ivo Herman, Michael Šebek

We consider a distributed system with identical agents, constant-spacing policy and asymmetric bidirectional control, where the asymmetry is due to different controllers, which we describe by transfer functions. By applying the wave transfer function approach, it is shown that, if there are two integrators in the dynamics of agents, then the positional coupling must be symmetric, otherwise the system is locally string unstable. This finding holds also for a distributed system with a generalized path-graph interaction topology due to the local nature of the wave transfer function. The main advantage of the transfer function approach is that it allows us to analyse the bidirectional control with an arbitrary complex asymmetry in the controllers, for instance, the control with symmetric positional but asymmetric velocity couplings.

Ivo Herman, Dan Martinec, Zdeněk Hurák et al.

We consider platoons composed of identical vehicles with an asymmetric nearest-neighbor interaction. We restrict ourselves to intervehicular coupling realized with dynamic arbitrary-order onboard controllers such that the coupling to the immediately preceding vehicle is proportional to the coupling to the immediately following vehicle. Each vehicle is modeled using a transfer function and we impose no restriction on the order of the vehicle. The platoon is described by a transfer function in a convenient product form. We investigate how the H-infinity norm and the steady-state gain of the platoon scale with the number of vehicles. We conclude that if the open-loop transfer function of the vehicle contains two or more integrators and the Fiedler eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian is uniformly bounded from below, the norm scales exponentially with the growing distance in the graph. If there is just one integrator in the open loop, we give a condition under which the norm of the transfer function is bounded by its steady-state gain - the platoon is string-stable. Moreover, we argue that in this case it is always possible to design a controller the predecessor following strategy.

Dan Martinec, Ivo Herman, Michael Šebek

The paper presents a novel approach for the analysis and control of a multi-agent system with non-identical agents and a path-graph topology. With the help of irrational wave transfer functions, the approach describes the interaction among the agents from the `local' perspective and identifies travelling waves in the system. It is shown that different dynamics of the agents creates a virtual boundary that causes a partial reflection of the travelling waves. Undesired effects due to the reflection of the waves, such as amplification/attenuation, long transients or string instability, can be compensated by the feedback controllers introduced in this paper. We show that the controllers achieve asymptotic and even string stability of the system.

Ivo Herman, Dan Martinec, Michael Sebek

This paper considers transfer functions in consensus systems where agents have identical SISO dynamics of arbitrary order. The interconnecting structure is a directed graph. The transfer functions for various inputs and outputs are presented in simple product forms with a similar structure of the numerator and the denominator. This structure combines the network properties and the agent model in an explicit way. The link between a higher-order and a single-integrator dynamics is shown and the polynomials of the transfer function in the single-integrator system are related to the graph properties. These properties also allow to generalize a result on the minimal dimension of the controllable subspace to the directed graphs.

Ivo Herman, Dan Martinec, J. J. P. Veerman

We consider an asymmetric control of platoons of identical vehicles with nearest-neighbor interaction. Recent results show that if the vehicle uses different asymmetries for position and velocity errors, the platoon has a short transient and low overshoots. In this paper we investigate the properties of vehicles with friction. To achieve consensus, an integral part is added to the controller, making the vehicle a third-order system. We show that the parameters can be chosen so that the platoon behaves as a wave equation with different wave velocities. Simulations suggest that our system has a better performance than other nearest-neighbor scenarios. Moreover, an optimization-based procedure is used to find the controller properties.