Leader following with non-homogeneous weights for control of vehicle formations

In this paper, we study a formation control scheme that achieves a tight formation in a 1D platoon. The scheme achieves constant inter-vehicle spacings (with no transient) for almost every vehicle pair whenever there are no disturbances. We build up from the basic leader following approach with a modification in the weight selection. In particular, each member tracks the movement of its immediate predecessor but also uses the leader state, which needs to be transmitted, in order to achieve a tight formation. The key design choice is the use of filters for the measurements that set the transfer functions from the leader trajectory to the inter-vehicle spacings to zero whenever possible. We support the analysis of the architecture with numerical simulations.