Battery-Aware Time/Range-Extended Leader-Follower Tracking for a Multi-Agent System

This paper studies extending the operation time/range of a multi-agent system (MAS) via enabling a battery awareness in mission-oriented control design. While MASs have gained much popularity nowadays, their use and deployment are often restricted by the operation time/range, due to the limited battery capacity. In an effort to overcome this barrier, this work proposes to leverage a battery's rate capacity effect to extend its runtime, which states that more energy can be drawn from the battery on less aggressive discharging rates. The leader-follower tracking control design is then established in a model predictive control (MPC) framework, which strikes a balance between tracking performance and energy consumption, accounts for the battery's rate capacity dynamics, and incorporates the energy and power constraints. A distributed optimization method is then used to distribute the MPC across the MAS. Leader-follower tracking based on the proposed distributed MPC algorithm is then evaluated through a simulation study and compared with an existing algorithm. The simulation results validate its effectiveness.