Robust Coordinated Hybrid Source Seeking With Obstacle Avoidance in Multivehicle Autonomous Systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 67; no. 2; pp. 706 - 721
• Main Authors: Poveda, Jorge I., Benosman, Mouhacine, Teel, Andrew R., Sanfelice, Ricardo G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-02-2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive algorithms; Adaptive control; Aerospace electronics; Closed loop systems; Collision avoidance; Convergence; Cooperative control; Dynamical systems; Feedback control; Hybrid systems; Jamming; Mathematical analysis; Navigation; nonlinear control systems; Nonlinear dynamical systems; Nonlinear dynamics; Obstacle avoidance; Perturbation theory; Potential fields; Robust control; Singular perturbation; Stability analysis; Switches; unmanned autonomous vehicles; Vehicle dynamics
• ISSN: 0018-9286; 1558-2523
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2021.3056365

In multivehicle autonomous systems that operate under unknown or adversarial environments, it is a challenging task to simultaneously achieve source seeking and obstacle avoidance. Indeed, even for single-vehicle systems, smooth time-invariant feedback controllers based on navigation or barrier functions have been shown to be highly susceptible to arbitrarily small jamming signals that can induce instability in the closed-loop system, or that are able to stabilize spurious equilibria in the operational space. When the location of the source is further unknown, adaptive smooth source seeking dynamics based on averaging theory may suffer from similar limitations. In this article, we address this problem by introducing a class of novel distributed hybrid model-free controllers, that achieve robust source seeking and obstacle avoidance in multivehicle autonomous systems, with vehicles characterized by nonlinear continuous-time dynamics stabilizable by hybrid feedback. The hybrid source seeking law switches between a family of cooperative gradient-free controllers, derived from potential fields that satisfy mild invexity assumptions. The stability and robustness properties of the closed-loop system are analyzed using Lyapunov tools and singular perturbation theory for set-valued hybrid dynamical systems. The theoretical results are validated via numerical and experimental tests.