Formation Control of Automated Guided Vehicles in the Presence of Packet Loss

This paper presents the formation tracking problem for non-holonomic automated guided vehicles. Specifically, we focus on a decentralized leader–follower approach using linear quadratic regulator control. We study the impact of communication packet loss—containing the position of the leader—on the performance of the presented formation control scheme. The simulation results indicate that packet loss degrades the formation control performance. In order to improve the control performance under packet loss, we propose the use of a long short-term memory neural network to predict the position of the leader by the followers in the event of packet loss. The proposed scheme is compared with two other prediction methods, namely, memory consensus protocol and gated recurrent unit. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the long short-term memory in packet loss compensation in comparison with memory consensus protocol and gated recurrent unit.