Control of of air-ground convoy subject to communication time delay

The problem associated with line formation (convoy) control among a team of aerial and ground vehicles is addressed by considering the fact that the vehicles share information with each other via communication channels that can be corrupted because of time delay. Among other results, we present rules for designing a decentralized control law that provides convoy stability, ensuring null formation error at steady state under the condition of constant speed, for the leader, compensating time-delay effects on the communication flow among the following vehicles. The results have been verified for convoy designs based on "look-ahead" topologies, in which each agent knows only the states of the preceding vehicles in the formation. The effectiveness of the proposed rules is finally illustrated by a simulation experiment involving a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Un-manned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), executing a scouting mission. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.