Velocity Coordination of Multi-vehicle Systems via Distributed Neighbor Selection

In this paper, we examine a data-driven control approach to coordination of multi-vehicle systems based on the distributed neighbor selection. The core of the proposed approach is to utilize a recently developed metric called relative tempo for distributed coordination which is computable from local measurable data for each vehicle in the network. The relative tempo between each agent and its neighbors is shown to be closely related to the directed spanning tree of the underlying network in a quantitative manner. Based on this fact, a local neighbor selection protocol is subsequently provided to construct the global refined communication structure which can both maintain the connectivity and increase the efficiency of the multi-vehicle coordination. The numerical study is finally provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.