Flocking with obstacle avoidance in switching networks of interconnected vehicles

The paper introduces a set of nonsmooth control laws that enable a group of vehicles to synchronize their velocity vectors and move as a flock while avoiding collisions with each other and with static obstacles in their environment. In addition, all vehicles converge to a common destination point, accomplishing a group mission. The proposed control law can steer each vehicle based on local information that can be obtained from within a spherical neighborhood around it. While only the nearest neighbors and obstacles affect a vehicle's motion, as the vehicles move the neighborhoods change discontinuously. The induced discontinuities in the control law of each vehicle do not affect the stability properties of the group collision free motion and connectivity requirements on the interconnection network can be relaxed due to the common objective.