Switching control for robust autonomous robot and vehicle platoon formation maintenance

In this paper, we analyze the problem of acquiring and maintaining desired inter-agent distances for non-hierarchical autonomous multi-agent platoons (1-dimensional formations), where the agents can be autonomous robots or vehicles, using only agent-wise relative position measurements. In our analysis, we consider the existence of measurement noises, which may cause the failure of controllers ignoring these noises in keeping the positions of the agents bounded. We design a switching control scheme that addresses the above problem, i.e., that acquires and maintains the desired inter-agent distances while guaranteeing that the agent positions are kept bounded.