Study on Decentralized Formation Control with Information Propagation Structure
- Paper number
IAC-07-C1.7.04
- Author
Mr. Masataka Arakawa, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/ISAS, Japan
- Coauthor
Dr. Junichiro Kawaguchi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/ISAS, Japan
- Year
2007
- Abstract
In recent years, formation control is studied actively. The area of fields that apply formation control covers, for instance, formation flight of the airplanes, multiple spacecrafts’ Earth observation missions or very long focal length telescope concepts, and the traffic control of cars. In the case of spacecrafts, the benefits of applying formation concepts lie in the increasing redundancy by the functional decentralization and the broader spatial coverage by multiple orbiting objects, and so on. On the other hand, in the case of the ground car traffic, ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) concepts give a mitigation of traffic congestion and reduction of energy consumption. This paper discusses one of the difficulties in such formation control system, especially focusing on the decentralized formation control. First, the one-dimensional car train system is studied. The car train system has the propagation system in which vibration of relative distance between cars is propagated backward. This propagation system sometimes induces the resonance phenomenon in which magnitude of vibration grows according to following cars, and a traffic jam could also happen at the end. This study presents the mechanism of this propagation system using z transformation. Then, this paper presents a decentralized control law aimed at a uniform convergence which solves or relaxes the divergent propagation. When it comes to practical use, this strategy has some advantages. One of them is that human manipulation is allowed at the same time with the proposed decentralized control. Another advantage is that it can be realized with only practical sensors, and the acceleration information is transmitted only backward, that is, in one way, which seems realistic for implementation on the actual car traffic system. To demonstrate and evaluate these characteristics, we have developed the experiment environment using one-dimensional and two-dimensional model cars. In the paper, the proposed decentralized formation control strategy is shown. Also the experiment system is introduced and the results of experiments are shown as well. Finally, the application to the spacecrafts’ formation flight is discussed.
- Abstract document