Adaptive Oscillation-Suppression Control for Distributed Nonholonomic Vehicle Safe Formation With Nested Input Saturation

Nonholonomic vehicles in distributed networks are prone to triggering nested velocity and acceleration saturation during reactive safety formations, exacerbating oscillations. This paper proposes a hybrid secure distributed collaborative frame-work, integrating compound adaptive anti-windup strategies with vehicle kinematics and safe geofences to achieve smooth and effective obstacle and collision avoidance while suppressing saturation-induced oscillations. The vehicle’s safe behavior for bypassing obstacles is formed via acceleration envelopes from safe geofences and input saturation, which generate constraint velocity commands. Additionally, a low-trigger and power-adjustable enhanced artificial potential field is integrated into the safety coordination to fine-tune vehicle maneuvers at extremely close distances to hazardous targets, ensuring high reliability. Safe acceleration envelopes and nested kinematic saturation are utilized to design a compound adaptive auxiliary dynamic system, smoothing oscillations induced by dual command constraints during formation. A distributed formation controller is further designed to enable multitasking collaboration in formations. The overall stability is mathematically analyzed, and the method’s superior smoothness and safety in task coordination are validated through simulations and experiments with vehicle clusters. Note to Practitioners—In response to the severe trajectory oscillations caused by saturation triggered by existing reactive avoidance approaches, this paper proposes a novel hybrid safety collaborative control based on the nonholonomic vehicle kinematics that markedly enhances the smoothness and safeness of formations in obstacle environments. The integration of safety acceleration envelopes, as well as low-trigger and adjustable artificial potential functions, markedly mitigates oscillations from reaction saturation compared with the solitary traditional artificial potential functions, as evidenced by simulations and experiments that demonstrate reduced oscillation amplitudes and shorter recovery times when evading hazardous targets using the proposed method. In addition, existing velocity/acceleration nested windups in actual applications are concurrently considered for the first time, and the corresponding compound adaptive anti-windup method is employed to smooth oscillations caused by control saturation. The security and smoothing strategies outlined allow for collaborative operations in more complicated obstacle environments and enable the deployment of larger vehicle clusters in confined spaces, significantly enhancing multi-vehicle collaboration’s economic viability and efficiency. Furthermore, the safety collaborative control framework designed for kinematics is conveniently structured for engineers as a standalone module, which is easily transferrable to commercial robotic products. The composite approach to safeness and smoothness can also be applied in other unmanned and manned collaborative scenarios.