Decentralized receding horizon control of cooperative vehicle formations

An overview of a novel approach to vehicle formation control is presented. The scheme is based on decentralized and cooperative predictive control. The control scheme is being tested on Unmanned Air Vehicle models at the Honeywell Laboratories in Minneapolis. Each vehicle is equipped with efficient guidance and control loops which enable the implementation of the decentralized scheme for higher-level control and coordination. In this framework, collision avoidance and constraint fulfillment are ensured by using a logic that switches to collision-free emergency maneuvers if necessary. The size of protection zones associated with this logic is determined from invariant set theory. The scheme also makes use of logic rules which improve stability and feasibility of the decentralized method by enforcing coordination. The decentralized control laws which respect the rules are computed using hybrid control design techniques. The proposed decentralized control scheme is formulated as optimization problems of small sizes which can be translated into equivalent piecewise affine state-feedback controllers. These controllers can then be downloaded as corresponding look-up tables to the onboard avionics of the vehicle and run in realtime.