Decentralized 2-D Control of Vehicular Platoons under Limited Visual Feedback
For researchers in multi-vehicle control, this work addresses the practical challenge of platoon control with limited sensing (visual feedback only), but the extension from 1-D to 2-D is incremental.
This paper designs a decentralized kinematic control protocol for 2-D platoons of unicycle vehicles using only local visual feedback from onboard cameras, without velocity measurements. The approach guarantees prescribed transient/steady-state performance, collision avoidance, and connectivity maintenance, validated in WEBOTS simulations.
In this paper, we consider the two dimensional (2-D) predecessor-following control problem for a platoon of unicycle vehicles moving on a planar surface. More specifically, we design a decentralized kinematic control protocol, in the sense that each vehicle calculates its own control signal based solely on local information regarding its preceding vehicle, by its on-board camera, without incorporating any velocity measurements. Additionally, the transient and steady state response is a priori determined by certain designer-specified performance functions and is fully decoupled by the number of vehicles composing the platoon and the control gains selection. Moreover, collisions between successive vehicles as well as connectivity breaks, owing to the limited field of view of cameras, are provably avoided. Finally, an extensive simulation study is carried out in the WEBOTS realistic simulator, clarifying the proposed control scheme and verifying its effectiveness.