Rendezvous Problem in Multi-vehicle Systems: Information Relay and Local Information Based Strategies

Cooperative control in the presence of a limited communication range poses significant theoretical and practical challenges. Some control strategies in this area rely on information relay where all information received by any vehicle is passed to all other vehicles that it communicates with. Some other control strategies in this area are based on local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange where each vehicle only communicates directly with all other vehicles in its communication range without information relay involved. Both information relay and local information based strategies have their strengths and, limitations. In this paper, we investigate the two control strategies in the context of a multi-vehicle rendezvous application. Various aspects of the two strategies are compared in relation to convergence time and overall system performance. Strengths and limitations of both control strategies are discussed and approaches for overcoming these limitations are proposed