High-Level Local Control Strategies for the Coordination of Large Groups of Mobile Autonomous Agents

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Intellectual Merit: Remarkable advances have been made in recent years in the developmentof small, agile, relatively inexpensive mobile autonomous vehicles, ultimately intended for a widevariety of purposes such as search and rescue, exploration, environmental monitoring, distributedsensing, the cleaning and maintaining of structures, etc. The existence of such vehicles and theanticipated development of still more advanced versions raises compelling questions: Can largenumbers of small autonomous vehicles be successfully deployed in the form of a "swarm" or "flock"as a search team, an exploration group, or something similar, to cooperatively carry out a pre-scribedtask and to respond as a group to high-level management commands? Can such a groupreliably function robustly, in a difficult or even uninhabitable environment such as outer space orunder sea, possibly without a designated leader, with limited communications between its mem-bers,and/or with the "roles"of its members not all the same and perhaps changing with time?What can we learn about how to organize these groupings from biological groupings such as insectswarms, bird ocks, and fish schools? Is there a hierarchy of "compatible" models appropriate toswarming/schooling/ ocking which is rich enough to explain these behaviors at various "resolutions"ranging from aggregate characterizations of emergent behavior, to "point models" for eachvehicle, to even more detailed descriptions which model individual vehicle dynamics? In broadterms, these are the issues we propose to addressMore specifically, we propose to study distributed multi-vehicle motion control algorithms withthe aim of better understanding the concepts upon which large classes of such algorithms mightdepend. For example, we would like to better understand the implications of changing nearestneighbor sets and how this intrinsic property can be modelled and analyzed within the contextof switched dynamical systems. We would also like to understand how to analyze asynchronoussystems, which because of coarse modelling, exhibit non-deterministic state transitions. We alsopropose to explore, devise and evaluate alternative data structures/models at various degrees ofgranularity for representing large homogeneous/hetrogeneous groups of mobile autonomous agentsmoving in a densely populated environment. These representations are needed for a variety ofpurposes: for overall management of a large group, for simulating the effects of various protocolson group behavior, etc. Example data structures could include "rigid point formations" and"Euclidean Distance Matrices" as well as other graph-theoretic concepts and vehicle models andvarious levels of abstraction.Broader Impacts: This project will advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching,training and learning in at least two different ways. First, graduate students involved inthe project will be expected to attend and present there results at technical meetings. Second,project graduate students will contribute to and participate in a short course on the topic whichwe envision organizing and giving towards the end of the project. We cannot think of any especiallyunusual way in which this project might broaden participation of underrepresented groups,although we certainly would encourage such participation. This project will enhance infrastructurefor research and education in at least two ways. First we expect to continue our crossdisciplinarycollaboration with our environmental biologist colleagues with whom we've already been workingfor several years. Second, we expect to continue to collaborate with our experimentalist colleagueswho have built an underwater multi-vehicle testbed { originally conceived by this PI } for tryingout various control algorithms. We hope to continue to contribute to broadening dissemination toenhance scientific and technological understanding by organizing and running boni fide interdisciplinarytechnical gatherings like the forthcoming Block Island Workshop on Cooperative Controlwhich we've co-organized and which will take place in June, 2003.