Energy-efficient environmentally adaptive consensus-based formation control with collision avoidance for multi-vehicle systems

Abstract

Technological advances over the past several decades have made it possible to develop increasingly cheap but also increasingly capable and autonomous unmanned marine vehicles. Additionally, this makes cooperative approaches to problem-solving a viable strategy in marine applications. This paper takes a look at a control scenario featuring a system consisting of a number of floating robotic platforms designed with long-term functioning in a challenging environment in mind. Decentralised consensus strategies for formation generation and formation keeping are described, with an introduction of modifications such as virtual forces that ensure collision avoidance. The group of vehicles is then placed in a simulated environment and subjected to environmental disturbances in the form of water current. An additional adaptive algorithm is proposed and implemented in the simulation, allowing the vehicles to assume a formation relative to the measured water current that ensures greater energy efficiency by having the vehicles physically shield each other from the current's detrimental effects. Finally, the simulation results are discussed and some directions for further work are suggested.