Motion coordination of thrust-propelled underactuated vehicles with intermittent and delayed communications

This paper addresses the coordinated control problem of under-actuated thrust-propelled vehicles with intermittent communication in the presence of varying communication delays. We propose a distributed control algorithm that achieves a prescribed formation for a team of vehicles that interact according to a directed graph containing a spanning tree. Each vehicle in the team is allowed to have access to its neighbors’ information only at an irregular sequence of time instants in the presence of possibly unbounded irregular communication delays and packet dropout. We show that our objective is reached under some easily verified conditions provided that the communication blackout intervals between each pair of neighbors are bounded. Simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.