—This article presents an aperiodic control solution for the remote guidance of a convoy of intelligent vehicles tracking non-linear trajectories. To accomplish this, it is assumed that the longitudinal and lateral stability problems are decoupled.
A centralized self-triggered consensus controller ensures convoy stability, thus maintaining the desired distance between vehicles while also achieving a significant reduction in the number of times the channel is accessed. In addition, a decentralized self-triggered controller is designed for each follower to track
nonlinear trajectories. With this self-triggered approach, each vehicle monitors its own state only at precise instants. The main contribution of this proposal is to reduce the wireless channel load while preserving the tracking performance of the convoy.@en

One of the main challenges in wireless cyber-physical systems is to reduce the load of the communication channel while preserving the control performance. In this way, communication resources are liberated for other applications sharing the channel bandwidth. The main contribution of this work is the design of a remote control solution based on an aperiodic and adaptive triggering mechanism considering the current network delay of multiple robotics units. Working with the actual network delay instead of the maximum one leads to abandoning this conservative assumption, since the triggering condition is fixed depending on the current state of the network. This way, the controller manages the usage of the wireless channel in order to reduce the channel delay and to improve the availability of the communication resources. The communication standard under study is the widespread IEEE 802.11g, whose channel delay is clearly uncertain. First, the adaptive self-triggered control is validated through the TrueTime simulation tool configured for the mentioned WiFi standard. Implementation results applying the aperiodic linear control laws on four P3-DX robots are also included. Both of them demonstrate the advantage of this solution in terms of network accessing and control performance with respect to periodic and non-adaptive self-triggered alternatives.@en