Formation Control of Platoons of Mobile Sensors With Intermittent Communications

We present a fully decentralized motion control algorithm for coordination of platoons of mobile agents with restricted communication capabilities. In order to address very low bandwidth communication between agents and time varying communication network topologies, we utilize a distributed full-state estimator onboard each agent. Agent motion and data fusion algorithms are implemented locally by each agent. We introduce a gradient-based framework in which we achieve asymptotic agreement among local (estimated) representations of the platoon and the actual configuration in terms of outputs of the agents.