A Topologically Inspired Path-Following Method With Intermittent State Feedback
Sage C. Edwards, Duc M. Le, Dan P. Guralnik, Warren E. Dixon
Abstract
Autonomous systems often operate in environments where state feedback may not be available, such as in anti-access and area denial environments. In these environments, it is often required that an agent track a path, despite interruptions in state feedback. As a result, the class of Relay-Explorer problems has emerged, where a switched system approach is used to account for intermittent state feedback. Past work on these problems established a framework for developing dwell-time conditions for stable tracking using these methods. However, existing work only applies to a limited class of reference paths and feedback region geometries. This letter advances a topologically inspired method for guaranteeing re-acquisition of feedback for nearly arbitrary geometries in arbitrary dimensions, all while relaxing the dwell-time conditions and retaining the uniformly ultimately bounded stability result from preceding work. Numerical experiments in the plane demonstrate an increase of hundreds of percentage points-even for fairly generic geometries-in the tracking error the agent could afford, using the proposed method, without sacrificing stability.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2021_atopologicallyin,
title = {A Topologically Inspired Path-Following Method With Intermittent State Feedback},
author = {Sage C. Edwards and Duc M. Le and Dan P. Guralnik and Warren E. Dixon},
booktitle = {RA-L 2021},
year = {2021}
}