Abstract-The ability of a robot team to reconfigure itself is useful in many applications: for metamorphic robots to change shape, for swarm motion towards a goal, for biological systems to avoid predators, or for mobile buoys to clean up oil spills. In many situations, auxiliary constraints, such as connectivity between team members or limits on the maximum hop-count, must be satisfied during reconfiguration. In this paper, we show that both the estimation and control of the graph connectivity can be accomplished in a decentralized manner. We describe a decentralized estimation procedure that allows each agent to track the algebraic connectivity of a time-varying graph. Based on this estimator, we further propose a decentralized gradient controller for each agent to maintain global connectivity during motion.

We investigate the vehicle platoon problems, where the actuator saturation and absent velocity measurement are taken into consideration. Firstly, a novel algorithm, where a smooth function is introduced to deal with the sharp corner of the input signals, is proposed for a group of vehicles with actuator saturation by using the consensus theory. Secondly, by applying an auxiliary system for the followers to estimate the velocities, a control strategy for the vehicle platoon with actuator saturation and absent velocity measurement is designed via the adaptive control approach. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

In this paper, the vehicle platoon control problems for a group of heterogeneous vehicles are investigated, where the multiple constraints of the vehicles and the communication delays among the vehicles are taken into consideration. A distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme is proposed to drive the heterogeneous vehicles into the desired platoon. In this DMPC framework, the multiple constraints, including the control constraints, state constraints, and jerk constraints, are employed to describe the practical characteristics of vehicles and the communication delays are time-varying and bounded. In this framework, a group of platoon control schemes is proposed based on the DMPC techniques. Furthermore, the feasibility and stability of the proposed vehicle platoon control system are strictly analyzed. Finally, numerical simulation and experiment with TurtleBot3 mobile robots are provided to validate the effectiveness of proposed approaches.

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