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Distributed cooperative deployment of heterogeneous autonomous agents: a Pareto suboptimal approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Giovanni Franzini Open the ORCID record for Giovanni Franzini [Opens in a new window]  and
Mario Innocenti
Giovanni Franzini*
Affiliation:
Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, Pisa 56122, Italy. E-mail: mario.innocenti@unipi.it
Mario Innocenti
Affiliation:
Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, Pisa 56122, Italy. E-mail: mario.innocenti@unipi.it
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: franzigi@utrc.utc.com
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Summary

The paper presents a distributed cooperative control law for autonomous deployment of a team of heterogeneous agents. Deployment problems deal with the coordination of groups of agents in order to cover one or more assigned areas of the operational space. In particular, we consider a team composed by agents with different dynamics, sensing capabilities, and resources available for the deployment. Sensing heterogeneity is addressed by means of the descriptor function framework, an abstraction that provides a set of mathematical tools for describing both agent sensing capabilities and the desired deployment. A distributed cooperative control law is then formally derived finding a suboptimal solution of a cooperative differential game, where the agents are interested in achieving the requested deployment, while optimizing the resources usage according to their dynamics. The control law effectiveness is proven by theoretical arguments, and supported by numerical simulations.

Keywords

Heterogeneous autonomous agentsCooperative controlDistributed controlDeployment problems
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 36 , Issue 12 , December 2018 , pp. 1943 - 1962
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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