Distributed Constrained Attitude and Position Control Using Graph Laplacians

Abstract

We present a graph theoretic and optimization based method for attitude and position consensus of a team of communicating vehicles navigating in three dimensional space. Coordinated control of such vehicles has applications in planetary scale mobile sensor networks, and multiple vehicle navigation in general. Using the Laplacian matrix of the communication graph, and attitude quaternions, a synthesis of the optimal stochastic matrix that drives the attitudes to consensus, is done, by solving a constrained semidefinite program. This novel methodology attempts to extend quadratically constrained attitude control (Q-CAC), to the consensus framework. The solutions obtained are used to realize coordinated rendezvous, and formation acquisition, in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles.