Distributed Collaborative Controlled Autonomous Vehicle Systems over Wireless Networks

Inspired by military tactical, civil help-and-rescue applications, it is desirable yet challenging to develop networked systems of autonomous vehicles and sensors in dynamic, resource-constrained and adversarial environments. An essential aspect of designing such collaborative systems is to address the communication needs of the vehicles in order to perform a given mission. The vehicles’ communication network should maintain a connectivity pattern based on the requirements of the mission. In this paper, we consider both the control and communication aspects for coordinated path planning of a group of autonomous vehicles in an adversarial environment. We propose distributed algorithms to control the vehicles’ trajectories over a wireless vehicle-to-vehicle network. Distributed control algorithms both with and without collaboration between the vehicles are presented. We study the performance of the wireless network over the distributed controlled autonomous vehicles. Simulation results show that collaboration between vehicles results in better performance for path planning and wireless inter-vehicle communications. However, contention based communication protocols are likely to fail due to severe channel conditions.