Distributed control of multi-agent systems with switching topology, delay, and link failure
Rasoul Ghadami · 2012
From ecology and evolutionary biology to social sciences, and from systems and control theory to aerospace and wireless sensor networks, researchers have been trying to develop an understanding of how a group of moving objects such as flocks of birds, schools of fish and crowds of people can perform collective tasks such as reaching a consensus or moving in a formation without centralized coordination. Researchers in the fields of robotics and control theory have also become interested in cooperative control of multi-agent systems such as a group of unmanned vehicles due to its vast variety of applications. This dissertation focuses on the study of distributed control of interconnected multi-agent systems. Research is conducted towards designing and analyzing distributed control algorithms for a fixed interconnection pattern as well as in the presence of switching network topology, interconnection delays between agents, and random link failure.