Leaderless Formation Control for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles

Accurate maintenance of a geometric configuration between multiple autonomous vehicles can often accomplish objectives impossible for a single vehicle. Much work on formation control in the current literature relies on the leader-follower approach, where some vehicles are designated as leaders while others are designated as followers. The leaders track predefined trajectories, and the followers track transformed versions of the states of their nearest neighbors according to given schemes. There are numerous studies on the leader-follower approach. In Ref. 1, nearest neighbor tracking strategies are used to control a fleet of autonomous mobile robots moving in formation. In Ref. 2, various schemes and explicit control laws for formation keeping and relative attitude alignment are derived for the coordination and control of multiple microspacecraft. While the leader-follower approach is easy to understand and implement, there are limitations. For example, the leader is a single point of failure for the formation. In addition, there is no explicit feedback from the follower to the leader: if the follower is perturbed by some disturbances, the formation cannot be maintained. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Utah State University, Email: [email protected] †Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Utah State University, Email: [email protected]