Coordinated autonomy
Subtitle: pursuit formations of multivehicle systems.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
Description: The last part of the thesis explores how structure in the interconnection topology among individuals of a multiagent system influences symmetry in its trajectories. More specifically, it is revealed how circulant connectivity preserves cyclic group symmetries in a formation of simple planar integrators, and to what extent circulant connectivity is necessary to achieve symmetry invariance.Inspired by pursuit problems found in the mathematics and physics literature, this thesis studies the geometric formations of autonomous agent systems consisting of individuals programmed to pursue one another. More generally, autonomous yet coordinated multivehicle systems might find application as distributed sensor arrays in terrestrial, space, or oceanic exploration, enhance the efficiency of surveillance, search, and rescue missions, or even contribute to the development of automated transportation systems. Therefore, from an engineering standpoint, the question of how to prescribe desired global behaviours through the application of only simple and local interactions is of significant and practical interest.In the first part of this thesis, the notion of pursuit is introduced by examining a system of identical linear agents in the plane. This idea is then extended to a system of wheeled vehicles, each subject to a single nonholonomic constraint, which is the principal focus of the thesis. It is revealed that the equilibrium formations of vehicles in cyclic pursuit are generalized regular polygons, and it is exposed how the multivehicle system's global behaviour can be shaped through appropriate controller gain assignments. The local stability of these equilibrium polygons is subsequently examined, revealing which formations are asymptotically stable. Finally, the results of multivehicle coordination experiments are reported. These experiments serve to demonstrate the practicality of the aforementioned distributed control strategy. The findings of this work not only bode well for continuing research on pursuit-based coordination techniques, but also for other cooperative control strategies employing similar local interactions.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: B, page: 5663.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.