Cooperative Control of Multi - Vehicle Systems

This paper will review a relatively new field of research, namely the area of Cooperative Control. This paper/report will cover many aspects about the field of cooperative control. The paper can be considered as a comprehensive study of many, if not all, related elements of cooperative control. This field studies the interconnections between systems to act collectively towards global objective or more. The study in this paper is induced by control theory being the steering wheel. In this paper, along with the detailed review of fields of cooperative control, a specific area of application is set as the regular example. The paper will consider the area of MultiVehicle Autonomous Systems. Decentralized control solutions can be employed in local systems and giving results matching global objectives. The powerful utilization of Graph Theory gives solid mathematical foundation to model communication interconnections. Many techniques under the field of cooperative control have interesting findings. The main principle of Consensus was set as the standard problem that included most of cooperation problems. Special tasks as formation control was discussed with detail in relation with other aspects in control theory. Applications and research status were discussed to give many possible areas of practical commercial use.