In Inter-Vehicular Adhoc Network (IVAN) does not have a fixed network topology but is highly dynamic. The topology of the network changes frequently because wireless links are established and broken down due to certain factors such as the velocity of the vehicles, their mobility patterns and their spatial density. These high dynamics also cause very short times for data transfer. This paper pre...

Control of multiple autonomous vehicles is a topic of current research interest for applications such as weather monitoring, geographical surveys, tactical reconnaissance and extra-terrestrial exploration. The task of persistent surveillance is different from a coverage/exploration problem in that the target area needs to be continuously searched, minimizing the time between visitations to the ...

Control of vehicle formations has emerged as a topic of significant interest to the controls community. In applications such as microsatellites and underwater vehicles, formations have the potential for greater functionality and versatility than individual vehicles. In this thesis, we investigate two topics relevant to control of vehicle formations: optimal vehicle control and cooperative contr...

The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Mobile Autonomous Robotics Technology Initiative (MARTI) program has enabled the development of fully-autonomous passenger-sized commercial vehicles and military tactical vehicles, as well as the development of cooperative vehicle behaviors, such as cooperative sensor sharing and cooperative convoy operations. The program has also developed behaviors to i...

-Recent advances in manufacturing automation have motivated vision-based control of autonomous vehicles operated in unattended factories, material handling processes, warehouse operations, and hazardous environment explorations. Existing vision-based tracking control systems of autonomous vehicles, however, have been limited in real-time applications due to slow and/or expensive visual feedback...

Based on a nonlinear hybrid dynamical systems model a new planning method for optimal coordination and control of multiple unmanned vehicles is investigated. The time dependent hybrid state of the overall system consists of discrete (roles, actions) and continuous (e.g. position, orientation, velocity) state variables of the vehicles involved. The evolution in time of the system’s hybrid state ...

The paper addresses the problem of making a set of vehicles follow a a set of given spatial paths at required speeds, while ensuring that they reach and maintain a desired formation pattern. Problems of this kind arise in a number of practical applications involving ground and underwater robots. The paper summarizes and brings together in a unified framework previous results obtained by the aut...

Multi-UAV systems are safety-critical, and guarantees must be made to ensure no unsafe configurations occur. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is ideal for analyzing such safety-critical systems; however, its direct application is limited to small-scale systems of no more than two vehicles due to an exponentially-scaling computational complexity. Previously, the sequential path planning (SPP) m...

In this paper, the stability analysis and control design of heterogeneous traffic flow is considered. It is assumed that the traffic flow consists of infinite number of cooperative non-identical vehicular platoons. Two different networks are investigated in stability analysis of heterogeneous traffic flow: 1) inter-platoon network which deals with the communication topology of lead vehicles and...