Distributed Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems Using Modular Architectures

This thesis presents new results on cooperative control of vehicles by studying modular architectures composed of networks of simplified models, and complex vehicles tracking the trajectories of these simplified models.

Dissipativity theory and integral quadratic constraints are used to establish sufficient conditions for stability and performance that scale at most linearly with network size.

Convex and non-convex inter-vehicle interactions are studied in the context of a source-seeking problem, where vehicles need to locate the minimum of an external scalar field. Experiments with quadrotors and simulation studies illustrate the results.