On the use of redundant manipulator techniques for control of platoons of cooperating robotic vehicles

In this correspondence, we discuss the parallelism between redundant manipulator control and the control of platoons (or swarms) of autonomous vehicles. We cast the platoon formation synthesis problem in an analogous manner to traditional redundancy resolution, and discuss techniques for real-time reactive path generation and control of the platoon. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulation experiments.