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

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.