Collision-free vehicle formation control under arbitrarily switching network topology

This paper is concerned with collision-free vehicle formation control when the inter-vehicle network topology is time-varying. Like typical collision-free formation control approaches, the proposed control approach involves two control phases: one for converging to a desired formation (no collision avoidance considered); the other for achieving collision avoidance. However, the proposed control approach has two distinctive features. First, the proposed control approach uses a fixed set of time-invariant control gains for achieving the desired formation but allows time-varying control gains only for avoiding collision. This feature lends itself well to the increase (and the decrease) of the controller's reliability (and complexity) during the most of manoeuvring periods. Second, the proposed control approach provably works for time-varying network topologies. Theoretical and numerical evidences are provided to justify these two features.