A cooperative formation control strategy maintaining connectivity of a multi-agent system

Dutta, Rajdeep; Sun, Liang; Kothari, Mangal; Sharma, Rajnikant; Pack, Daniel J.

doi:10.1109/iros.2014.6942708

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…These works are only focused on the estimation of the target position and assume that there exists an ideal control scheme that lead the robots towards the moving target. In [24][25][26][27][28], different control schemes are presented for addressing the problem of maintaining a desired flight formation with respect to a moving target. A compilation of different techniques for addressing the flight formation control problem is presented in [29].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperative Visual-SLAM System for UAV-Based Target Tracking in GPS-Denied Environments: A Target-Centric Approach

et al. 2020

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Autonomous tracking of dynamic targets by the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging problem that has practical applications in many scenarios. In this context, a fundamental aspect that must be addressed has to do with the position estimation of aerial robots and a target to control the flight formation. For non-cooperative targets, their position must be estimated using the on-board sensors. Moreover, for estimating the position of UAVs, global position information may not always be available (GPS-denied environments). This work presents a cooperative visual-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system that allows a team of aerial robots to autonomously follow a non-cooperative target moving freely in a GPS-denied environment. One of the contributions of this work is to propose and investigate the use of a target-centric SLAM configuration to solve the estimation problem that differs from the well-known World-centric and Robot-centric SLAM configurations. In this sense, the proposed approach is supported by theoretical results obtained from an extensive nonlinear observability analysis. Additionally, a control system is proposed for maintaining a stable UAV flight formation with respect to the target as well. In this case, the stability of control laws is proved using the Lyapunov theory. Employing an extensive set of computer simulations, the proposed system demonstrated potentially to outperform other related approaches.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperative Visual-SLAM System for UAV-Based Target Tracking in GPS-Denied Environments: A Target-Centric Approach

et al. 2020

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“…where r ij denotes the relative distance vector between (i, j), and f ( r ij ) is a decreasing function with relative distance magnitude. In accordance with an exponential communication model [8], the function f can be expressed as…”

Section: Graph Theory Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A multi-agent graph with positive λ 2 has at least one spanning tree ensuring an information flow path among agents, whereas with null λ 2 there exists no spanning tree and so the information exchange gets interrupted. A higher value of λ 2 indicates more connections among agents, which is useful in cooperative missions like multi-agent tracking [4] and formation control [8] for maintaining, improving or controlling time-varying connectivity during the dynamics.…”

Section: Graph Theory Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A connectivity value above zero guarantees that there exists at least one spanning tree [21] or an information flow path among the members in a group. Earlier research shows a fair amount of contributions [1,12,19] dedicated to maintaining, controlling and maximizing connectivity of a multi-agent network, during cooperative tasks such as target tracking and formation control [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Role of Iso-connectivity Topologies in Multi-agent Interactions

Dutta,

Pack

2016

Preprint

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In this paper, we present the benefits of exploring different topologies with equal connectivity measure, or iso-connectivity topologies, in relation to the multiagent system dynamics. The level of global information sharing ability among agents in a multi-agent network can be quantified by a connectivity measure, called as the Algebraic Connectivity of the associated graph consisting of point-mass agents as nodes and inter-connection links between them as edges. Distinct topologies with the same connectivity play profound role in multi-agent dynamics as they offer various ways to reorganize agents locations according to the requirement during a cooperative mission, without sacrificing the information exchange capability of the entire network. Determination of the distinct multi-agent graphs with identical connectivity is a multimodal problem, in other words, there exist multiple graphs that share the same connectivity. We present analytical solutions of determining distinct graphs with identical connectivity. A family of isospectral graphs are found out by utilizing an appropriate similarity transformation. Moreover, a zone of no connectivity change in a dense graph is unraveled where an agent can move freely without causing any change in the global connectivity. The proposed solutions are validated with the help of sufficient examples.

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“…In many missions, UAVs are asked to follow designated trajectories. The trajectory-tracking function is needed in applications such as cooperative rendezvous [2], cooperative target tracking [3] and towed-system control [4], [5]. To develop a trajectory-tracking control law, several techniques have been used including feedback linearization [6], fuzzy logic [7], [8], dynamic inversion [9], backstepping [4], [5] and nested saturation [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with a pre-existing autopilot system in the loop

Sun

Pack

2015

2015 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)

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Implementing a control law on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle can be problematic when the existing autopilot system is incompatible with the controller structure. This paper extends the control strategy that incorporates a preexisting autopilot system in a closed-loop control law design [1]. In [1], the control scheme explicitly involves the autopilot in the controller derivation, based on an assumption that the autopilot is able to follow the input commands in an exponential manner, which may not be possible. In this paper, we present a novel controller design that incorporates unknown autopilot gains. The controller is proved to guarantee that the tracking error converges to an ultimate bound, which is a function of the maximum magnitude of unmeasured disturbances and control gains. Simulation results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

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A cooperative formation control strategy maintaining connectivity of a multi-agent system

Cited by 14 publications

References 18 publications

Cooperative Visual-SLAM System for UAV-Based Target Tracking in GPS-Denied Environments: A Target-Centric Approach

Cooperative Visual-SLAM System for UAV-Based Target Tracking in GPS-Denied Environments: A Target-Centric Approach

Role of Iso-connectivity Topologies in Multi-agent Interactions

Controlling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with a pre-existing autopilot system in the loop

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