Vehicular Applications of the IFD
(Presented at the Universidad de Nariño, Pasto, Colombia)
Cooperative control design for autonomous vehicles includes the development of allocation strategies that coordinate the distribution of moving vehicles among pre-defined areas of interest so that some performance criterion is optimized. When a vehicle gets assigned to an area to perform tasks (e.g., visit targets), the benefit of assigning any other vehicle to this area generally decreases since the same vehicle usually can perform several tasks in the same vicinity with little additional time or fuel costs. There is a resulting coupling between the assignment of one vehicle position and the assignment of all other vehicle positions. The ability of a cooperative controller to overcome this coupling depends on the vehicles’ distributed, poorly-informed, and transient assessments that guide their actions (e.g., on local sensor information about the location or status of tasks/targets in some vicinity). In particular, when uncertainties dominate the problem (e.g., when vehicles’ motion and sensing are highly constrained), the challenge of how to untangle the assignment coupling to gain some of the benefits of cooperation is not fully understood to date.
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