Cooperative Control

Introduction

Cooperative control deals with the problem of controlling a multi-agent robotic system to fulfill a common goal. The tasks associated with these robotic systems include search, exploration, surveillance, rescue operations and mapping unknown or partially known environments. In real-world applications, the control of multiple robots is often complicated by the following factors

• • Resource constraints on sensing, motion and communication capabilities, onboard computation capacities, and power supplies
  • Unknown, uncertain nature of the environments requires robotic systems to be adaptive to environmental changes, accurate in information acquisition, prompt and smart in decision making
  • Distributed, asynchronous information and computation structures are inherent due to the geographical separation and communication constraints

Goals

We are interested in the decision-making process in cooperative control applications. We currently concentrate on the cooperative mission control of multiple Uninhabitated Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) in a battlefield environment. The main objectives include developing the methodology and software that enable

• Dynamic task assignment
• Vehicle routing and obstacle-free path planning
• Distributed and real-time decision making
• Optimal trajectory generation under nonholonomic constraints