Dyadic Control for Formation Maintenance and Collision Avoidance in Cooperative Road Transportation Systems

Dyadic control is a new control frontier, which is to address two (often conflicting) objectives simultaneously. We consider rendering both <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">compact formation</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">collision avoidance</i> in uncertain cooperative road transportation systems. These two tasks, however, present conflicting objectives, where excessive stress on formation tightness may lead to an increased risk of collisions. The tasks are creatively formulated as equality constraints and inequality constraints. Based on the generalized Udwadia-Kalaba (GUK) equation, two independent controllers are developed to handle these constraints, with orthogonality between the control components ensuring no mutual interference. The proposed method guarantees the uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness of the system, even in the presence of unknown uncertainties. The effectiveness of the control strategy is demonstrated through simulations of a four-vehicle fleet system.