4,614 research outputs found
Vehicle platoons through ring coupling
In this paper, a novel strategy for the control of a string of vehicles is designed. The vehicles are coupled in a unidirectional ring at the interaction level: each vehicle is influenced by the position of its immediate forward neighbor; the first vehicle in the platoon is influenced by the position of the last vehicle. Through these interactions a cooperative behavior emerges and a platoon of vehicles moving at a constant velocity with constant inter-vehicle spacings is formed. This contrasts with more traditional control schemes where an independent leader vehicle is followed by the remaining vehicles. For this control structure, stability properties are established. The concept of string stability of a platoon is discussed and applied to the ring interconnection. Design rules are presented, showing how an appropriate choice of parameter values leads to a constant spacing or constant time headway policy. Furthermore, the scheme has a characteristic property: it maintains the platoon structure when subject to malfunctioning vehicles
Decentralized regulation of dynamic systems
A special class of decentralized control problem is discussed in which the objectives of the control agents are to steer the state of the system to desired levels. Each agent is concerned about certain aspects of the state of the entire system. The state and control equations are given for linear time-invariant systems. Stability and coordination, and the optimization of decentralized control are analyzed, and the information structure design is presented
Stability Margin Scaling Laws for Distributed Formation Control as a Function of Network Structure
We consider the problem of distributed formation control of a large number of
vehicles. An individual vehicle in the formation is assumed to be a fully
actuated point mass. A distributed control law is examined: the control action
on an individual vehicle depends on (i) its own velocity and (ii) the relative
position measurements with a small subset of vehicles (neighbors) in the
formation. The neighbors are defined according to an information graph.
In this paper we describe a methodology for modeling, analysis, and
distributed control design of such vehicular formations whose information graph
is a D-dimensional lattice. The modeling relies on an approximation based on a
partial differential equation (PDE) that describes the spatio-temporal
evolution of position errors in the formation. The analysis and control design
is based on the PDE model. We deduce asymptotic formulae for the closed-loop
stability margin (absolute value of the real part of the least stable
eigenvalue) of the controlled formation. The stability margin is shown to
approach 0 as the number of vehicles N goes to infinity. The exponent on the
scaling law for the stability margin is influenced by the dimension and the
structure of the information graph. We show that the scaling law can be
improved by employing a higher dimensional information graph.
Apart from analysis, the PDE model is used for a mistuning-based design of
control gains to maximize the stability margin. Mistuning here refers to small
perturbation of control gains from their nominal symmetric values. We show that
the mistuned design can have a significantly better stability margin even with
a small amount of perturbation. The results of the analysis with the PDE model
are corroborated with numerical computation of eigenvalues with the state-space
model of the formation.Comment: This paper is the expanded version of the paper with the same name
which is accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. The final
version is updated on Oct. 12, 201
Transients in the Synchronization of Oscillator Arrays
The purpose of this note is threefold. First we state a few conjectures that
allow us to rigorously derive a theory which is asymptotic in N (the number of
agents) that describes transients in large arrays of (identical) linear damped
harmonic oscillators in R with completely decentralized nearest neighbor
interaction. We then use the theory to establish that in a certain range of the
parameters transients grow linearly in the number of agents (and faster outside
that range). Finally, in the regime where this linear growth occurs we give the
constant of proportionality as a function of the signal velocities (see [3]) in
each of the two directions. As corollaries we show that symmetric interactions
are far from optimal and that all these results independent of (reasonable)
boundary conditions.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Towards Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation of LPV-SS Models
How to efficiently identify multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) linear
parameter-varying (LPV) discrete-time state-space (SS) models with affine
dependence on the scheduling variable still remains an open question, as
identification methods proposed in the literature suffer heavily from the curse
of dimensionality and/or depend on over-restrictive approximations of the
measured signal behaviors. However, obtaining an SS model of the targeted
system is crucial for many LPV control synthesis methods, as these synthesis
tools are almost exclusively formulated for the aforementioned representation
of the system dynamics. Therefore, in this paper, we tackle the problem by
combining state-of-the-art LPV input-output (IO) identification methods with an
LPV-IO to LPV-SS realization scheme and a maximum likelihood refinement step.
The resulting modular LPV-SS identification approach achieves statical
efficiency with a relatively low computational load. The method contains the
following three steps: 1) estimation of the Markov coefficient sequence of the
underlying system using correlation analysis or Bayesian impulse response
estimation, then 2) LPV-SS realization of the estimated coefficients by using a
basis reduced Ho-Kalman method, and 3) refinement of the LPV-SS model estimate
from a maximum-likelihood point of view by a gradient-based or an
expectation-maximization optimization methodology. The effectiveness of the
full identification scheme is demonstrated by a Monte Carlo study where our
proposed method is compared to existing schemes for identifying a MIMO LPV
system
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