A selection of recent advances in networked multivehicle systems

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle systems have been the topic of much research owing to their ability to perform dangerous, repetitive and automated tasks in remote or hazardous environments. The potential for multivehicle systems cooperating together to accomplish given tasks is starting to draw together researchers from several fields, including robotics, control systems, and computer science. Using selected case studies as a motivation, this paper examines emerging results in networked multi-vehicle systems. Recent work has taken many different directions, such as hybrid systems, distributed control, differential games, control architectures, and artificial intelligence. The focus of this paper is on the control systems perspective. An attempt is made to present some current issues common to networked multivehicle systems, and to show how they have been solved to dte in the perspective of the case studies.