Coordinated control and information architecture

Abstract

Coordinated control of vehicle formations is the motivating problem. The key idea is the use of Model Predictive Control (MPC) as a localized control law to connect the overall formation control performance and the inter-vehicle communication quality. The working problem is a simple 1-D vehicle formation with noisy channels. The measure of information quality is the covariance of the state estimates. A special form of MPC is used, which absorbs the estimate covariance into its probabilistically posed no-collision constraints. The resulting control law is deterministic and is adapted to the information quality.