Decentralization of Coordination Variables in Multi-vehicle Systems

Equipping each vehicle in a cooperative team with a global picture of the group helps vehicles direct toward specified desired group goals and achieve desirable group behaviors. In this paper, we instantiate the group level information formalized as "coordination variables" on each vehicle. We then develop consensus strategies to guarantee that each coordination variable instantiation converges to a sufficiently common value in the case that the coordination variable is driven by a common input or inputs with bounded inconsistency. We show conditions under which consensus can be achieved for each coordination variable instantiation and provide boundedness analyses for the inconsistency of different instantiations when inconsistent inputs exist. The effectiveness of the proposed strategies is demonstrated through a formation control example