Coordinated Path-Following Control for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles With Communication Time Delays

In this brief, the coordinated path-following control for multiple nonlinear autonomous vehicles connected by digital networks is studied. To compensate for the time delays of the network actively, a novel networked predictive control strategy is proposed. Compared with existing networked control strategies, the control strategy proposed in this brief admits advantages such as high computational efficiency, robustness to disturbances, and relaxed restriction on the communication topology. The theoretical analysis of the proposed method is given and the conditions to achieve the control objectives are derived. Finally, the experiments are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.