Task-Driven Formation of Nonholonomic Vehicles With Communication Constraints

Abstract

This work focuses on developing a task-driven formation framework in the presence of communication constraints for a group of nonholonomic mobile vehicles. The center of this framework is a cost function that characterizes both the task-related and the communication constraint related costs followed by a newly defined concept of compatible task and communication constraints. It is shown that, if the task and communication constraints are compatible as defined, then the formation problem can be solved as an optimization for the given cost function through a family of formation control laws obtained from off-the-shelf optimization algorithms. In particular, the gradient-like control laws can b..