2010
Distributed Collaborative Controlled Autonomous Vehicle Systems over Wireless Networks
H. Chen, P. Hovareshti and J. S. Baras
Proceddings of the 18th Mediterranean Conference onControl and Automation (MED 2010), pp. 1695-1700, Marrakech, Morocco, June 23-25, 2010.
Abstract
Inspired by military tactical, civil help-and-rescue
applications, it is desirable yet challenging to develop networked systems of autonomous vehicles and sensors in dynamic,
resource-constrained and adversarial environments. An essential aspect of designing such collaborative systems is to address
the communication needs of the vehicles in order to perform
a given mission. The vehicles’ communication network should
maintain a connectivity pattern based on the requirements of
the mission.
In this paper, we consider both the control and communication aspects for coordinated path planning of a group of autonomous vehicles in an adversarial environment. We
propose distributed algorithms to control the vehicles’ trajectories over a wireless vehicle-to-vehicle network. Distributed
control algorithms both with and without collaboration between
the vehicles are presented. We study the performance of the
wireless network over the distributed controlled autonomous
vehicles. Simulation results show that collaboration between
vehicles results in better performance for path planning and
wireless inter-vehicle communications. However, contention based communication protocols are likely to fail due to severe channel conditions.