Distributed Heading Synchronization of Multi-Vehicle Systems via Pulse-Based Communication

Distributed collective motion coordination has found a variety of applications in both military operations and civilian activities. As a critical component of collective motion coordination, distributed heading synchronization of multi-vehicle systems has received increasing attentions. Most existing approaches usually employ continuous control design followed by discretization based implementation. Such two-stage strategy, however, cannot guarantee the original designed control performance in final implementation since discretization will harm or even destabilize the controller designed in the continuous-time domain. In this paper, motivated by the synchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators, we propose an integrated control and communication approach for distributed heading synchronization of multi-vehicle systems. By leveraging the pulse-based communication, our approach does not need discretization in final implementation, making it feasible to guarantee the original design performance and meanwhile obeying the discrete nature of communication. Furthermore, benefiting from pulse signals containing no information, our proposed approach brings higher degrees of reliability and lower complexity of communication. Numerical simulations and experiments are provided to verify the effectiveness of our approach.