Guiding one-dimensional formations of mobile agents with coarsely quantized information

Abstract In this paper, we study the formation control problem for platoons of mobile agents that are guided by coarsely quantized information. A comprehensive trajectory-based analysis is presented for the convergence of the multi-agent platoon, which greatly improves the existing result that applies only to 3-agent platoons. Using tools from non-smooth analysis, it is shown that the formation can converge within finite time even when each agent is constrained by a 1-bit transmission channel. We further introduce hysteresis in the quantization scheme to deal with the possible chattering phenomena as a result of the coarse quantization. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

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