Cooperative Control of Complex Robotic Multi-Agent Systems

Description

Advances in control technology and communication technology have enabled the evolution of robotic groups into large-scale systems that could complete cooperative tasks which are more complicated than ever before. However, the requirements of efficiency, robustness and adaptability for robotic groups, when they are coordinated to execute these tasks, have increased dramatically in industrial and military fields in recent years. In this context, traditional control methodologies present some serious limitations. For example, many unexpected factors like information loss, time delays and perturbations can easily cause mission failure for robotic multi-agent systems, especially in some complex and hash environments.

This proposed research aims at proposing new distributed control methodologies and algorithms to enable complex robotic multi-agent systems to execute complex cooperative tasks rapidly, accurately and robustly. Simple local information passing, storage and processing are critical to accomplish this goal for large-scale robotic groups. Using the tool of graph theory, smart information exchange architectures within robotic multi-agent systems are proposed, which are more likely to lead to the emergence of novel cooperative control strategies that could cope with difficult situations. To make our research closer to reality, our various theoretical results will be tested using the robotic testbed with the feature of fast prototyping of different sensing, communication and control strategies at the University of Groningen.