Formation Control of Multiple Autonomous Vehicle Systems

5 Robust and Adaptive Formation Control

A practical issue encountered in the design of formation control algorithms is that real MVSs usually suffer from unpredictable exogenous disturbances as well as different levels of model uncertainties. The implementation performance of formation control algorithms depends on their robustness with respect to exogenous disturbances and model uncertainties. This chapter introduces three different approaches to improve the robustness of synchronized tracking control or formation control. They are based on:

• the active uncertainty and disturbance estimator (UDE), a concept originally proposed by Zhong and Rees [9], and which has recently been applied to MVSs [10]
• sliding‐mode control
• adaptive control.

It is important to note that some of the robust control algorithms presented in this chapter are obtained by improving the algorithms presented in last two chapters, and that both state feedback and output feedback approaches are discussed.

5.1 Problem Statement

Consider a group of identical vehicles. The equation of motion for each vehicle is the well‐known second‐order nonlinear model:

(5.1)

where is the (linear or angular) ...