348 research outputs found
Distributed sampled-data control of nonholonomic multi-robot systems with proximity networks
This paper considers the distributed sampled-data control problem of a group
of mobile robots connected via distance-induced proximity networks. A dwell
time is assumed in order to avoid chattering in the neighbor relations that may
be caused by abrupt changes of positions when updating information from
neighbors. Distributed sampled-data control laws are designed based on nearest
neighbour rules, which in conjunction with continuous-time dynamics results in
hybrid closed-loop systems. For uniformly and independently initial states, a
sufficient condition is provided to guarantee synchronization for the system
without leaders. In order to steer all robots to move with the desired
orientation and speed, we then introduce a number of leaders into the system,
and quantitatively establish the proportion of leaders needed to track either
constant or time-varying signals. All these conditions depend only on the
neighborhood radius, the maximum initial moving speed and the dwell time,
without assuming a prior properties of the neighbor graphs as are used in most
of the existing literature.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure
Flexible bearing-only rendezvous control of mobile robots
In this paper we study rendezvous control of multiple mobile robots. We propose a control law that merely requires each robot to measure the relative bearings of their neighbors in their local coordinate frames. Distance measurement or relative position estimation is not required. In theory, the proposed control law verifies that distance information is redundant in rendezvous control tasks though the objective of rendezvous is to decrease the inter-robot distances. In practice, the control law provides a simple solution to vision-based rendezvous tasks where bearings can be measured by visual sensing. Moreover, we generalize the proposed control law by introducing an additional heading vector into the control law. This heading vector may preserve the system convergence and, in the meantime, provides great flexibility to adapt the control law for nonholonomic robot models or obstacle avoidance
Circular formation control of fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds
In this paper we propose an algorithm for stabilizing circular formations of
fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds. The algorithm is based on the idea of
tracking circles with different radii in order to control the inter-vehicle
phases with respect to a target circumference. We prove that the desired
equilibrium is exponentially stable and thanks to the guidance vector field
that guides the vehicles, the algorithm can be extended to other closed
trajectories. One of the main advantages of this approach is that the algorithm
guarantees the confinement of the team in a specific area, even when
communications or sensing among vehicles are lost. We show the effectiveness of
the algorithm with an actual formation flight of three aircraft. The algorithm
is ready to use for the general public in the open-source Paparazzi autopilot.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to IROS 201
Decentralized formation control with connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance under limited and intermittent sensing
A decentralized switched controller is developed for dynamic agents to
perform global formation configuration convergence while maintaining network
connectivity and avoiding collision within agents and between stationary
obstacles, using only local feedback under limited and intermittent sensing.
Due to the intermittent sensing, constant position feedback may not be
available for agents all the time. Intermittent sensing can also lead to a
disconnected network or collisions between agents. Using a navigation function
framework, a decentralized switched controller is developed to navigate the
agents to the desired positions while ensuring network maintenance and
collision avoidance.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ACC 201
A general approach to coordination control of mobile agents with motion constraints
This paper proposes a general approach to design convergent
coordination control laws for multi-agent systems subject to
motion constraints. The main contribution of this paper is to prove
in a constructive way that a gradient-descent coordination control law
designed for single integrators can be easily modified to adapt for various
motion constraints such as nonholonomic dynamics, linear/angular
velocity saturation, and other path constraints while preserving the
convergence of the entire multi-agent system. The proposed approach is
applicable to a wide range of coordination tasks such as rendezvous and
formation control in two and three dimensions. As a special application,
the proposed approach solves the problem of distance-based formation
control subject to nonholonomic and velocity saturation constraints
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Swarm Systems
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been applied
successfully to multi-agent scenarios. Typically, these methods rely on a
concatenation of agent states to represent the information content required for
decentralized decision making. However, concatenation scales poorly to swarm
systems with a large number of homogeneous agents as it does not exploit the
fundamental properties inherent to these systems: (i) the agents in the swarm
are interchangeable and (ii) the exact number of agents in the swarm is
irrelevant. Therefore, we propose a new state representation for deep
multi-agent RL based on mean embeddings of distributions. We treat the agents
as samples of a distribution and use the empirical mean embedding as input for
a decentralized policy. We define different feature spaces of the mean
embedding using histograms, radial basis functions and a neural network learned
end-to-end. We evaluate the representation on two well known problems from the
swarm literature (rendezvous and pursuit evasion), in a globally and locally
observable setup. For the local setup we furthermore introduce simple
communication protocols. Of all approaches, the mean embedding representation
using neural network features enables the richest information exchange between
neighboring agents facilitating the development of more complex collective
strategies.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, version 3 (published in JMLR Volume 20
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