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Collective Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Systems by Implicit Leadership
Coordination within decentralized agent groups frequently requires reaching global consensus, but typical hierarchical approaches to reaching such decisions can be complex, slow, and not fault-tolerant. By contrast, recent studies have shown that in decentralized animal groups, a few individuals without privileged roles can guide the entire group to collective consensus on matters like travel direction. Inspired by these findings, we propose an implicit leadership algorithm for distributed multi-agent systems, which we prove reliably allows all agents to agree on a decision that can be determined by one or a few better-informed agents, through purely local sensing and interaction. The approach generalizes work on distributed consensus to cases where agents have different confidence levels in their preferred states. We present cases where informed agents share a common goal or have conflicting goals, and show how the number of informed agents and their confidence levels affects the consensus process. We further present an extension that allows for fast decision-making in a rapidly changing environment. Finally, we show how the framework can be applied to a diverse variety of applications, including mobile robot exploration, sensor network clock synchronization, and shape formation in modular robots.Engineering and Applied SciencesOther Research Uni
Location-dependent services for mobile users
Abstract—One of the main issues in mobile services ’ research (M-service) is supporting M-service availability, regardless of the user’s context (physical location, device employed, etc.). However, most scenarios also require the enforcement of context-awareness, to dynamically adapt M-services depending on the context in which they are requested. In this paper, we focus on the problem of adapting M-services depending on the users ’ location, whether physical (in space) or logical (within a specific distributed group/application). To this end, we propose a framework to model users ’ location via a multiplicity of local and active service contexts. First, service contexts represent the mean to access to M-services available within a physical locality. This leads to an intrinsic dependency of M-service on the users’ physical location. Second, the execution of service contexts can be tuned depending on who is requesting what M-service. This enables adapting M-services to the logical location of users (e.g., a request can lead to different executions for users belonging to different groups/applications). The paper firstly describes the framework in general terms, showing how it can facilitate the design of distributed applications involving mobile users as well as mobile agents. Then, it shows how the MARS coordination middleware, implementing service contexts in terms of programmable tuple spaces, can be used to develop and deploy applications and M-services coherently with the above framework. A case study is introduced and discussed through the paper to clarify our approach and to show its effectiveness. Index Terms—Context-awareness, coordination infrastructures, M-services, mobility, multiagent systems. I
Blackboard Rules for Coordinating Context-aware Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Thanks to improvements in wireless communication technologies and increasing
computing power in hand-held devices, mobile ad hoc networks are becoming an
ever-more present reality. Coordination languages are expected to become
important means in supporting this type of interaction. To this extent we argue
the interest of the Bach coordination language as a middleware that can handle
and react to context changes as well as cope with unpredictable physical
interruptions that occur in opportunistic network connections. More concretely,
our proposal is based on blackboard rules that model declaratively the actions
to be taken once the blackboard content reaches a predefined state, but also
that manage the engagement and disengagement of hosts and transient sharing of
blackboards. The idea of reactiveness has already been introduced in previous
work, but as will be appreciated by the reader, this article presents a new
perspective, more focused on a declarative setting.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432
Coordination for a Group of Autonomous Mobile Agents with Multiple Leaders
In this paper, we consider the coordination control of a group of autonomous
mobile agents with multiple leaders. Different interconnection topologies are
investigated. At first, a necessary and sufficient condition is proved in the
case of fixed interconnection topology. Then a sufficient condition is proposed
when the interconnection topology is switched. With a simple first-order
dynamics model by using the neighborhood rule, both results show that the group
behavior of the agents will converge to the polytope formed by the leaders.Comment: 5 pages,7 figure
Bounded Distributed Flocking Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots
There have been numerous studies on the problem of flocking control for
multiagent systems whose simplified models are presented in terms of point-mass
elements. Meanwhile, full dynamic models pose some challenging problems in
addressing the flocking control problem of mobile robots due to their
nonholonomic dynamic properties. Taking practical constraints into
consideration, we propose a novel approach to distributed flocking control of
nonholonomic mobile robots by bounded feedback. The flocking control objectives
consist of velocity consensus, collision avoidance, and cohesion maintenance
among mobile robots. A flocking control protocol which is based on the
information of neighbor mobile robots is constructed. The theoretical analysis
is conducted with the help of a Lyapunov-like function and graph theory.
Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed
distributed flocking control scheme
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