Coordination with binary controllers

Distributed formation keeping control is a motion coordination problem which aims atachieving a desired geometrical shape for the positions of a group of agents (e.g. robots). In problemsof formation control, an important component is the flow of information among theagents. Although the usual assumption in the literature is the exchange of perfect informationamong the agents, the latter might be a restrictive requirement due to real-worldconstraints.

To cope with this restriction, quantized information and control have beenproposed and studied in the literature. In particular, there has been a growing interest inbinary quantizers and controllers owing to the recent developments in cyber-physicalsystems.

This thesis is mainly focused on the problem of distributed position-based formationkeeping of a group of continuous-time dynamic agents using binary controllers. The binary information and control models a sensing scenario in which each agent detectswhether or not the components of its current distance vector from a neighbor are aboveor below the prescribed distance and applies a force (in which each component takesa binary value) to reduce or increase the actual distance.

In this context, we considerdifferent classes of dynamical agents, including strict output passive systems, unicycles, and nonholonomic wheeled carts. For the control design and analysis, we use tools fromdiscontinuous dynamical systems, passivity, hybrid dynamical systems, graph theoryand internal-model-based approach.

Dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/82aec2b5-42b1-4abc-80e0-2fe2f1e18fad