Formation Control for a Fleet of Autonomous Ground Vehicles: A Survey

Abstract

Autonomous/unmanned driving is the major state-of-the-art step that has a potential to fundamentally transform the mobility of individuals and goods. At present, most of the developments target standalone autonomous vehicles, which can sense the surroundings and control the vehicle based on this perception, with limited or no driver intervention. This paper focuses on the next step in autonomous vehicle research, which is the collaboration between autonomous vehicles, mainly vehicle formation control or vehicle platooning. To gain a deeper understanding in this area, a large number of the existing published papers have been reviewed systemically. In other words, many distributed and decentralized approaches of vehicle formation control are studied and their implementations are discussed. Finally, both technical and implementation challenges for formation control are summarized.

Stable emergent formations for a swarm of autonomous car-like vehicles

“…We shall now show that by this estimate and the comparison theorem the solution can be extended on ½t 0 ; 1Þ. To this end, consider again system (4). By taking the inner product of the first equation of (…”

“…The examples in the previous section provide helpful intuitive insights into the behavior of system (4). They seem to suggest that the solutions are bounded about the centroid.…”

“…We have used two other parameters, i > 0 and ' i > 0 in system (4). Because the parameters are a measure of the rate of decrease of L LðtÞ at time t !…”

“…1 Recent applications are seen in the control of pattern formation of fleets of autonomous car-like vehicles or swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles for tasks such as aiding traffic management of automated highways, environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue in hazardous environments, and area coverage and reconnaissance. [2][3][4] An exciting development in this area of research is the use of swarm principles to design the controllers. Animal swarming is considered an instance of collective selforganization, which is defined in the study by Camazine et al 5 as "a broad range of pattern-formation processes in both physical and biological systems, with the pattern being an emergent property of the system, rather than a property imposed on the system by an external ordering influence."…”

Millimeter Wave Radar for Intelligent Transportation Systems: a Case Study of Multi-Target Problem Solution

“…The applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are attracting increasing attention in recent years because of rapidly growing usage in a wide range of industrial sphere, including regional planning and mapping [1], forestry [2], environmental monitoring [3], logistics [4], agriculture [5] and many other civil application [6,7]. Autonomous ground vehicle technology is making a prominent appearance around the world in many forms and related research, testing, and deployment of autonomous vehicles is escalating in many parts of economy [8][9][10]. One of the main problems remains the determination of the speed, position and other parameters of such moving objects [11][12][13][14].…”