Rigid Formation Geometry Based Station Keeping by Fixed Speed Vehicles without Self-Location Information
Barış Fi̇dan, Ahmed Fahim Mostafa · 2024
This paper studies a rigid graph theory and distance geometry-based approach to the autonomous vehicle station-keeping problem for situations where global positioning is not available. We propose a control scheme for the station keeping of an autonomous vehicle$A$, i.e., the task of navigating$A$to a target point$T$whose distances are predefined from a set of beacons, where$A$is not capable of measuring its self-position. The beacons can be stations or other autonomous vehicles, and$A$is assumed to have nonholonomic unicycle motion kinematics and can measure only distances to the beacons. In the proposed control scheme, the vehicle-beacon range measurements are mapped to the estimate of the distance to$T$utilizing notions of globally rigid graphs for guaranteeing unique estimation, short-term odometry, and triangulation techniques. The overall scheme involves a target pursuit control law, which can be selected in switching or linear quadratic optimal forms to regulate this distance estimate to zero. Besides formal analysis of the range estimation scheme and discussion of realtime implementations, the performance of the proposed control scheme is verified by simulation tests.