Abstract
The ability of a robot team to reconfigure itself is useful in many applications: for metamorphic robots to change shape, for swarm motion towards a goal, for biological systems to avoid predators, or for mobile buoys to clean up oil spills. In many situations, auxiliary constraints, such as connectivity between team members or limits on the maximum hop-count, must be satisfied during reconfiguration. In this paper, we show that both the estimation and control of the graph connectivity can be accomplished in a decentralized manner. We describe a decentralized estimation procedure that allows each agent to track the algebraic connectivity of a time-varying graph. Based on this estimator, we further propose a decentralized gradient controller for each agent to maintain global connectivity during motion.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 390-396 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Automatica |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2010 |
Funding
This work was supported in part by NSF grants ECS-0601661 and IIS-0308224, and by the Office of Naval Research. The material in this paper was partially presented at the 2008 American Control Conference at Seattle, Washington, USA, June 11–13, 2008. This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by Associate Editor Dragan Nešić under the direction of Editor Andrew R. Teel.
Keywords
- Autonomous mobile robots
- Connectivity
- Decentralized control
- Graph theory
- Numerical algorithms
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
