Cooperative Control of Networked Vehicles

The fundamental problem of vehicle platooning is studied extensively which describes the task of arranging a set of vehicles so that they drive with a common velocity and a prescribed distance. Local design objectives are derived that have to be satisfied by the vehicle controllers. In particular, it is shown that the vehicles have to be externally positive to achieve collision avoidance. As an abstraction from real traffic scenarios, swarms of networked vehicles are considered. The main difference between swarming and traffic problems is that a communication structure that has been appropriate in the beginning might become unsuited for the control task due to the relative movement of the vehicles. To solve this problem, this thesis proposes to use the Delaunay triangulation as a switching communication structure.