Section: New Results

Modified Integral Control Globally Counters Symmetry-Breaking Biases

Participants: Alain Sarlette

This is the end of the PhD thesis of Zhifei Zhang, under joint supervision of A.Sarlette at Ghent University and Zhihao Ling at ECUST Shanghai. The work [23] builds on our earlier proposal of formulating integral control on nonlinear groups as the integral of proportional correcting feedback actions: since these actions belong to a Lie algebra, they can be integrated in this vector space and applied at the current point. We here show how this controller can be modified in order to recover coordinated motion among steering-controlled vehicles, in a situation where biases would make the standard controller fail. We prove how the simple addition of the integral controller allows to recover global convergence towards the coordinated motion, restoring symmetry exactly.