Motion Coordination of Thrust-Propelled Underactuated Vehicles in the Presence of Communication Delays

Abstract

This paper addresses the coordinated control problem of underactuated thrust-propelled vehicles in the presence of irregular communication delays under a directed communication graph topology. We propose a distributed control algorithm that drives the vehicles to a prescribed formation provided that the communication graph contains a spanning tree. Using the multi-dimensional small-gain approach, we show that the proposed control scheme is robust with respect to varying communication delays, which can be discontinuous with unknown upper bounds. Simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.