Cooperative Control Design Strategies with Local Interactions

In this paper, we study cooperative control design strategies that only require local information exchange between vehicles. In particular, we focus on how consensus algorithms or their extensions can be applied in cooperative control of multi-vehicle systems. Three types of coupling between vehicles are distinguished and corresponding design strategies are proposed. These design strategies are then applied to several cooperative control applications including cooperative timing, formation maintenance, rendezvous, altitude alignment and synchronized rotations as a proof of concept.