Cooperative Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Flocks of Vehicles

This paper describes the guidance of a group of autonomous cooperating vehicles using model predictive control. The developed control strategy allows to find a feasible near optimal control sequence with a short and constant computation delay in all situations. It makes use of the nonlinear model of the vehicle and takes other vehicle intentions into account. Numerical simulations are provided where a group of vehicles must reach several way-points while avoiding obstacles and collisions inside the group. These simulations allow to compare computation delay and efficiency of the proposed approach with traditional optimisation.