Cooperative Path Following of Autonomous Vehicles with Model Predictive Control and Event Triggered Communications

This paper presents a solution to the problem of multiple vehicle cooperative path following (CPF) that takes explicitly into account the constraints on the vehicles inputs and the topology of the inter-vehicle communications network. The solution involves decoupling the original constrained CPF problem into two sub-problems: i) single vehicle constrained path following and ii) multi-agent system (MAS) coordination. The first is solved by adopting a sampled-data model predictive control (MPC) scheme, whereas the latter is tackled by using a distributed control law with an event triggered communication (ETC) mechanism. We show that this design methodology yields a stable closed-loop CPF system: the path following error for each vehicle is globally asymptotically stable (GAS) and the coordination errors between the vehicles are bounded. A simulation example consisting of three autonomous vehicles following a given 2D- desired formation illustrates the efficacy of the CPF strategy proposed.