Time Coordination and Collision Avoidance Using Leader-Follower Strategies in Multi-Vehicle Missions

In recent years, the increasing popularity of multi-vehicle missions has been accompanied by a growing interest in the development of control strategies to ensure safety in these scenarios. In this work, we propose a control framework for coordination and collision avoidance in cooperative multi-vehicle missions based on a speed adjustment approach. The overall problem is decoupled in a coordination problem, in order to ensure coordination and inter-vehicle safety among the agents, and a collision-avoidance problem to guarantee the avoidance of non-cooperative moving obstacles. We model the network over which the cooperative vehicles communicate using tools from graph theory, and take communication losses and time delays into account. Finally, through a rigorous Lyapunov analysis, we provide performance bounds and demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithms with numerical and experimental results.