A Pulse-Based Integrated Communication and Control Design for Decentralized Collective Motion Coordination

Decentralized collective motion coordination is fundamental in systems as diverse as mobile sensor networks, swarm robotics, autonomous vehicles, and animal groups. In motion coordination, to conform to the discontinuous message exchange that can only be conducted at discrete-time instants, existing approaches addressing motion coordination usually perform continuous control design followed by discretization-based implementation. This two-stage strategy, however, can be problematic since discretization can harm or even destabilize the controller designed in the continuous-time domain. Inspired by pulse-based interaction in flashing fireflies and firing neurons, we propose an integrated communication and control approach for the motion coordination. The approach circumvents discretization and can guarantee the original control design performance in final implementation. Its communication only employs simple and identical pulses, which significantly reduces processing latency and communication delay compared with conventional packet-based communications. Not only can heading control be achieved in the proposed approach to coordinate the headings (orientations) of motions in a network, but also spacing control for circular motion is achievable to design the spacing between neighboring nodes (e.g., vehicles or robots).