Information flow and its relation to the stability of the motion of vehicles in a rigid formation | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Information flow and its relation to the stability of the motion of vehicles in a rigid formation


Abstract:

It is known in the literature on automated highway systems that information flow can significantly affect the propagation of errors in spacing in a collection of vehicles...Show More

Abstract:

It is known in the literature on automated highway systems that information flow can significantly affect the propagation of errors in spacing in a collection of vehicles. This paper investigates this issue further for a homogeneous collection of vehicles, where in the motion of each vehicle is modeled as a point mass. The structure of the controller employed by the vehicles is as follows: U/sub i/(s)=C(s)/spl Sigma/ /sub j/spl isin/si/(X/sub i/ - X/sub j/ - L/sub ij//s) where U/sub i/(s) is the (Laplace transformation of) control action for the i/sup th/ vehicle, L/sub ij/is the position of the i/sup th/ vehicle, L/sub ij/ is the desired distance between the i/sup th/ and the j/sup th/ vehicles in the collection, C(s) is the controller transfer function and S/sub i/ is the set of vehicles that the i/sup th/ vehicle can communicate with directly. This paper further assumes that the information flow is undirected, i.e., i/spl isin/S/sub j//spl harr/j/spl isin/S/sub i/, and the information flow graph is connected. We consider information flow in the collection, where each vehicle can communicate with a maximum of q(n) vehicles, such that q(n) may vary with the size n of the collection. We first show that C(s) cannot have any zeroes at the origin to ensure that relative spacing is maintained in response to a reference vehicle making a maneuver where its velocity experiences a steady state offset. We then show that if the control transfer function C(s) has one or more poles located at the origin of the complex plane, then the motion of the collection of vehicles will become unstable if the size of the collection is sufficiently large. These two results imply that C(0)/spl ne/0 and C(0) is well defined. We further show that if q(n)/sup 3//n/sup 2//spl rarr/0 as n /spl rarr//spl infin/ then there is a low frequency sinusoidal disturbance of at most unit amplitude acting on each vehicle such that the maximum errors in spacing response increase at least as O (/spl radic/(n/...
Date of Conference: 08-10 June 2005
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 01 August 2005
ISBN Information:

ISSN Information:

Conference Location: Portland, OR, USA

Contact IEEE to Subscribe

References

References is not available for this document.