Resilient Leader-Follower Formation Control for Nonholonomic Systems Using Channel State Feedback

Leader-follower formation control is a widely used control strategy that often needs systems to exchange information over a wireless radio communication network. These wireless networks are subject to deep fades, where a severe drop in the quality of the communication link occurs. Such deep fades may significantly impact the formation’s performance and stability. In many applications, however, the variation in channel state is a function of the system’s kinematic states. This suggests that one can use channel state information as a feedback signal to recover the performance loss caused by a deep fade. This paper derives sufficient conditions to assure almost-sure asymptotic stability of a leader-follower nonholonomic system in the presence of deep fades. These conditions relate the channel state to the system’s convergence rate. This paper uses this fact to reconfigure the controller. Simulation results are used to illustrate the main results in the paper.