Design of Distributed and Fixed-Structure Controllers for Cooperative Vehicle Control

Cooperating autonomous vehicles (agents), controlled in a decentralized manner and communicating with each other, offer increased system reliability and flexibility as opposed to a single agent or a centralized control scheme. This work deals with the problems of stability analysis and controller synthesis for multi-agent systems with a changing number of agents, switching communication topology, time-varying communication delays and restrictions on the controller structure. Robust and nominal performance synthesis problems are formulated, solved and systematically applied to the cooperative vehicle control.