Gerencser, BalazsMTA Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest,Hungary
Author
Fidan, BarisThe Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Department, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada
Author
Abstract
We consider trajectories where the sign of the derivative of each entry is opposite to that of the corresponding entry in the gradient of an energy function. We show that this condition guarantees convergence when the energy function is quadratic and positive definite and partly extend that result to some classes of positive semi-definite quadratic functions including those defined using a graph Laplacian. We show how this condition allows establishing the convergence of a platoon application in which it naturally appears, due to deadzones in the control laws designed to avoid instabilities caused by inconsistent measurements of the same distance by different agents
Hendrickx, J., Gerencser, B., & Fidan, B. (2019). Trajectory convergence from coordinate-wise decrease of quadratic energy functions, and applications to platoons. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 4(1), 151-156. https://doi.org/10.1109/LCSYS.2019.2922607 (Original work published 2019)