Cooperative Path Following of Robotic Vehicles Using an Event-Based Control and Communication Strategy

In this letter, a novel approach to the cooperative path following (CPF) control problem is proposed that aims to reduce the frequency of communication between the robotic vehicles while achieving cooperation. Specifically, a decentralized, event-based cooperative controller is designed to achieve coordination between the robotic vehicles, tasked to follow a priori specified reference geometric path while maintaining a desired formation. The event-based cooperative controller transmits the necessary information at discrete event times, that are computed based on an event triggering condition designed such that the convergence and stability properties of the consensus controller is preserved. The Input-to-State Stability framework is utilized to prove the stability and convergence of the CPF control with event-based control and communication scheme. The proposed method is experimentally validated using Autonomous Surface Vehicles communicating over Wi-Fi. It is shown that the event-based approach results in significant reduction of information exchange between the vehicles when compared to the conventional periodic transmission.