Cooperating autonomous vehicles

Cooperating autonomous vehicles are analyzed. Distributed and coordinated control of autonomous vehicles (automatic ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned surface and underwater vessels) has received significant attention during the last years. In this chapter a solution is developed for the problem of distributed control of cooperating autonomous robots which chase a target. The distributed control aims at achieving the synchronized convergence of the autonomous vehicles towards the target and at maintaining the cohesion of the vehicle’s team, while also avoiding collisions between the individuals vehicles and collisions between them and obstacles in their motion plane. To estimate the motion characteristics of the target, distributed filtering is performed. It is shown that to treat the distributed control problem for the cooperating autonomous vehicles a Lyapunov theory-based method is introduced. Moreover, to treat the distributed filtering and state estimation in the multi-vehicle system, decentralized state estimation methods can be applied. The proposed distributed control and filtering method can be used for surveillance and security tasks executed by multi-robot systems. The method for coordinated control of autonomous vehicles is a generic one and thus applicable to various types of autonomous robots, such as automatic ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned surface vessels or autonomous underwater vessels. In particular, the chapter treats the following topics: (a) cooperating unmanned surface vessels and (b) Cooperating unmanned ground vehicles.