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