Decentralized robust control for multi-vehicle navigation

This paper presents a decentralized architecture for the navigation of a formation of autonomous mobile robots evolving in an uncertain environment with obstacles. The motion planning scheme consists in decentralized receding horizon controllers that reside on each vehicle to achieve coordination among formation agents. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is that each vehicle only requires local knowledge of its neighboring vehicles. The main requirement for designing a conflict free trajectory that satisfy the coupling constraints, in a decentralized way, is that each robot do not deviate too far from its assumed trajectory designed without taking into account the coupling constraints. Having established an open loop control strategy for motion planning, an effective saturated closed-loop controller based on integral sliding mode for trajectory tracking is presented. Finally, some simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness, real-time and high robustness properties of the proposed architecture.