Bounded Coordination Control of Second-order Dynamic Agents

Abstract

This paper presents a constructive design of distributed and bounded coordination controllers that force mobile agents with second-order dynamics to track desired trajectories and to avoid collision between them. The control design is based on the new bounded control design technique for second-order systems, and new pairwise collision avoidance functions. The pair wise collision functions are functions of both the relative position and velocity of the agents instead of only the relative position as in the literature. Desired features of the proposed control design include: 1) Boundedness of the control inputs by a predefined bound despite collision avoidance between the agents considered, 2) No collision between any agents, 3) Asymptotical stability of desired equilibrium set, and 4) Instability of all other undesired critical sets of the closed loop system. The proposed control design is then applied to design a coordination control system for a group of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft.