A Decomposition Approach to Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Control

We present methods that generate cooperative strategies for multi-vehicle control problems using a decomposition approach. By introducing a set of tasks to be completed by the team of vehicles and a task execution method for each vehicle, we decomposed the problem into a combinatorial component and a continuous component. The continuous component of the problem is captured by task execution, and the combinatorial component is captured by task assignment. In this paper, we present a solver for task assignment that generates near-optimal assignments quickly and can be used in real-time applications. To motivate our methods, we apply them to an adversarial game between two teams of vehicles. One team is governed by simple rules and the other by our algorithms. In our study of this game we found phase transitions, showing that the task assignment problem is most difficult to solve when the capabilities of the adversaries are comparable. Finally, we implement our algorithms in a multi-level architecture with a variable replanning rate at each level to provide feedback on a dynamically changing and uncertain environment.Comment: 36 pages, 19 figures, for associated web page see http://control.mae.cornell.edu/earl/decom

Distributed tracking control of leader-follower multi-agent systems under noisy measurement

In this paper, a distributed tracking control scheme with distributed estimators has been developed for a leader-follower multi-agent system with measurement noises and directed interconnection topology. It is supposed that each follower can only measure relative positions of its neighbors in a noisy environment, including the relative position of the second-order active leader. A neighbor-based tracking protocol together with distributed estimators is designed based on a novel velocity decomposition technique. It is shown that the closed loop tracking control system is stochastically stable in mean square and the estimation errors converge to zero in mean square as well. A simulation example is finally given to illustrate the performance of the proposed control scheme.Comment: 8 Pages, 3 figure