Model predictive based multi-vehicle formation control with collision avoidance and localization uncertainty

In this paper, multi-vehicle formation control with collision avoidance based on model predictive control (MPC) is proposed. Since there exist the uncertainty arise from the localization in the real environments, it is difficult to guarantee collision avoidance among vehicles by the standard MPC based methods. Furthermore, since MPC based methods can only consider collision avoidance at discrete time steps, a collision may occur in intervals between prediction time steps. In order to prevent these problems, the proposed method tightens the constraints according to the upper bound of the disturbance arise from the localization uncertainty based on robust model predictive control scheme, and constrains the transition of the collision avoidance constraints to exclude possibilities of collisions between time steps. Numerical examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.