39,039 research outputs found
Multi-agent decision-making dynamics inspired by honeybees
When choosing between candidate nest sites, a honeybee swarm reliably chooses
the most valuable site and even when faced with the choice between near-equal
value sites, it makes highly efficient decisions. Value-sensitive
decision-making is enabled by a distributed social effort among the honeybees,
and it leads to decision-making dynamics of the swarm that are remarkably
robust to perturbation and adaptive to change. To explore and generalize these
features to other networks, we design distributed multi-agent network dynamics
that exhibit a pitchfork bifurcation, ubiquitous in biological models of
decision-making. Using tools of nonlinear dynamics we show how the designed
agent-based dynamics recover the high performing value-sensitive
decision-making of the honeybees and rigorously connect investigation of
mechanisms of animal group decision-making to systematic, bio-inspired control
of multi-agent network systems. We further present a distributed adaptive
bifurcation control law and prove how it enhances the network decision-making
performance beyond that observed in swarms
Distributed allocation of mobile sensing swarms in gyre flows
We address the synthesis of distributed control policies to enable a swarm of
homogeneous mobile sensors to maintain a desired spatial distribution in a
geophysical flow environment, or workspace. In this article, we assume the
mobile sensors (or robots) have a "map" of the environment denoting the
locations of the Lagrangian coherent structures or LCS boundaries. Based on
this information, we design agent-level hybrid control policies that leverage
the surrounding fluid dynamics and inherent environmental noise to enable the
team to maintain a desired distribution in the workspace. We establish the
stability properties of the ensemble dynamics of the distributed control
policies. Since realistic quasi-geostrophic ocean models predict double-gyre
flow solutions, we use a wind-driven multi-gyre flow model to verify the
feasibility of the proposed distributed control strategy and compare the
proposed control strategy with a baseline deterministic allocation strategy.
Lastly, we validate the control strategy using actual flow data obtained by our
coherent structure experimental testbed.Comment: 10 pages, 14 Figures, added reference
Fuzzy logic control for energy saving in autonomous electric vehicles
Limited battery capacity and excessive battery dimensions have been two major limiting factors in the rapid advancement of electric vehicles. An alternative to increasing battery capacities is to use better: intelligent control techniques which save energy on-board while preserving the performance that will extend the range with the same or even smaller battery capacity and dimensions. In this paper, we present a Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Controller (Type-2 FLC) as the speed controller, acting as the Driver Model Controller (DMC) in Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV). The DMC is implemented using realtime control hardware and tested on a scaled down version of a back to back connected brushless DC motor setup where the actual vehicle dynamics are modelled with a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) system. Using the minimization of the Integral Absolute Error (IAE) has been the control design criteria and the performance is compared against Type-1 Fuzzy Logic and Proportional Integral Derivative DMCs. Particle swarm optimization is used in the control design. Comparisons on energy consumption and maximum power demand have been carried out using HIL system for NEDC and ARTEMIS drive cycles. Experimental results show that Type-2 FLC saves energy by a substantial amount while simultaneously achieving the best IAE of the control strategies tested
Fuzzy Distributed Cooperative Tracking For A Swarm Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Heterogeneous Goals
Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Systems Science on 29 December 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00207721.2015.1126380This article proposes a systematic analysis for a tracking problem which ensures cooperation amongst a swarm of UAVs, modelled as nonlinear systems with linear and angular velocity constraints, in order to achieve different goals. A distributed Takagi-Sugeno (TS) framework design is adopted for the representation of the nonlinear model of the dynamics of the UAVs. The distributed control law which is introduced is composed of both node and network level information. Firstly feedback gains are synthesised using a Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) control law structure, for a collection of isolated UAVs; ignoring communications among the swarm. Then secondly, based on an alternation-like procedure, the resulting feedback gains are used to determine Lyapunov matrices which are utilised at network level to incorporate into the control law the relative differences in the states of the vehicles, and to induce cooperative behaviour. Eventually stability is guaranteed for the entire swarm. The control synthesis is performed using tools from linear control theory: in particular the design criteria are posed as Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). An example based on a UAV tracking scenario is included to outline the efficacy of the approach.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC
Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging
applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require
update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless technology is
preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if
the devices support multi-hop communication. So far, however, feedback control
over wireless multi-hop networks has only been shown for update intervals on
the order of seconds. This paper presents a wireless embedded system that tames
imperfections impairing control performance (e.g., jitter and message loss),
and a control design that exploits the essential properties of this system to
provably guarantee closed-loop stability for physical processes with linear
time-invariant dynamics. Using experiments on a cyber-physical testbed with 20
wireless nodes and multiple cart-pole systems, we are the first to demonstrate
and evaluate feedback control and coordination over wireless multi-hop networks
for update intervals of 20 to 50 milliseconds.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in: 10th ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (with CPS-IoT Week 2019) (ICCPS '19),
April 16--18, 2019, Montreal, QC, Canad
Design and Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems Through Co-Simulation: The Voronoi Tessellation Use Case
This paper reports on the use of co-simulation techniques to build prototypes of co-operative autonomous robotic cyber-physical systems. Designing such systems involves a mission-specific planner algorithm, a control algorithm to drive an agent performing its task; and the plant model to simulate the agent dynamics. An application aimed at positioning a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in a bounded area, exploiting a Voronoi tessellation algorithm developed in this work, is taken as a case study. The paper shows how co-simulation allows testing the complex system at the design phase using models created with different languages and tools. The paper then reports on how the adopted co-simulation platform enables control parameters calibration, by exploiting design space exploration technology. The INTO-CPS co-simulation platform, compliant with the Functional Mock-up Interface standard to exchange dynamic simulation models using various languages, was used in this work. The different software modules were written in Modelica, C, and Python. In particular, the latter was used to implement an original variant of the Voronoi algorithm to tesselate a convex polygonal region, by means of dummy points added at appropriate positions outside the bounding polygon. A key contribution of this case study is that it demonstrates how an accurate simulation of a cooperative drone swarm requires modeling the physical plant together with the high-level coordination algorithm. The coupling of co-simulation and design space exploration has been demonstrated to support control parameter calibration to optimize energy consumption and convergence time to the target positions of the drone swarm. From a practical point of view, this makes it possible to test the ability of the swarm to self-deploy in space in order to achieve optimal detection coverage and allow unmanned aerial vehicles in a swarm to coordinate with each other
COORDINATION OF LEADER-FOLLOWER MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM WITH TIME-VARYING OBJECTIVE FUNCTION
This thesis aims to introduce a new framework for the distributed control of multi-agent systems with adjustable swarm control objectives. Our goal is twofold: 1) to provide an overview to how time-varying objectives in the control of autonomous systems may be applied to the distributed control of multi-agent systems with variable autonomy level, and 2) to introduce a framework to incorporate the proposed concept to fundamental swarm behaviors such as aggregation and leader tracking. Leader-follower multi-agent systems are considered in this study, and a general form of time-dependent artificial potential function is proposed to describe the varying objectives of the system in the case of complete information exchange. Using Lyapunov methods, the stability and boundedness of the agents\u27 trajectories under single order and higher order dynamics are analyzed. Illustrative numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the validity of our results. Then, we extend these results for multi-agent systems with limited information exchange and switching communication topology. The first steps of the realization of an experimental framework have been made with the ultimate goal of verifying the simulation results in practice
Orbit design for future SpaceChip swarm missions in a planetary atmosphere
The effect of solar radiation pressure and atmospheric drag on the orbital dynamics of satellites-on-a-chip (SpaceChips) is exploited to design equatorial long-lived orbits about the oblate Earth. The orbit energy gain due to asymmetric solar radiation pressure, considering the Earth's shadow, is used to balance the energy loss due to atmospheric drag. Future missions for a swarm of SpaceChips are proposed, where a number of small devices are released from a conventional spacecraft to perform spatially distributed measurements of the conditions in the ionosphere and exosphere. It is shown that the orbit lifetime can be extended and indeed selected through solar radiation pressure and the end-of-life re-entry of the swarm can be ensured, by exploiting atmospheric drag
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