Probabilistic robust coordinated control of quorum systems of mobile autonomous agents

摘要多机器人平台、多车辆或移动智能体群体的协调控制是一个内容丰富、引人入胜的研究领域，具有重大的商业和军事影响。该项目寻求通过健壮性、容错性和分布式实现来实现协调的、面向目标的任务级控制。该方案提出1)一种概率方法来解决受参数不确定性、动态变化的操作条件和移动代理之间相邻交互变化影响的协调控制的业务问题；2)一种基于群体系统的体系结构来定义一组移动代理的相邻交互、信息流和通信配置。概率方法对现实世界的建模效果较好，保守性较小；它降低了控制复杂性，提高了性能，并有效地利用了控制能力。所提出的反馈控制建立在一个新的体系结构上，该体系结构的目标是在有限通信带宽的约束下实现分布式实现和容错。所提出的移动自主代理群体协调控制范例将为基本、高带宽任务的分布式执行提供高度的自主性，允许操作员在高层次上与平台系统进行交互。智力上的优点在于这个项目的跨学科性质，它将有望为移动代理群体的协调控制培养新的范例，并为进一步研究产生新的主题。该教育计划包括在研究生水平的控制课程中加强和整合鲁棒控制和分布式算法的跨学科研究课题。为了评估拟议的教育活动的有效性，PI计划与宾夕法尼亚州立大学伦纳德工程教育加强中心的同事合作。私家侦探本人是教员中的一名女性；她将继续与宾夕法尼亚州立大学的女性工程项目（WEP）和女性工程师协会（SWE）合作，招收女性和少数族裔攻读研究生，并鼓励她们在毕业后从事学术事业。

AbstractCoordinated control of multiple robotic platforms, multi-vehicles, or groups of mobile agents is arich and fascinating research field and has great commercial and military impact. This projectseeks to achieve coordinated, goal oriented task level control with robustness, failure-tolerance,and distributed implementation. The PI proposes 1) a probabilistic approach to address therobustness issue of the coordinated control subject to parametric uncertainty, dynamicallychanging operating conditions, and the change of neighboring interaction between mobile agents,and 2) a quorum-system based architecture that defines the neighboring interaction, informationflow and communication configuration of a group of mobile agents.The probabilistic approach has a better modeling of the real world with less conservativeness; itprovides reduced control complexity and enhanced performance and efficient use of controleffort. The proposed feedback control is built on a new architecture that targets distributedimplementation and failure-tolerance under the constraints of limited communication bandwidth.The proposed paradigm for coordinated control of groups of mobile autonomous agents willprovide a high degree of autonomy for distributed execution of elemental, high bandwidth tasks,allowing the operator to interact with the system of platforms at a high level. The intellectualmerit lies in the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which will hopefully foster newparadigms for coordinated control of groups of mobile agents, and spawn new topics for furtherresearch.The educational plan includes a strengthening and integration of interdisciplinary research topicsof robust control and distributed algorithms in a graduate level control course. To assess theeffectiveness of the proposed educational activities, the PI plans to collaborate with colleagues atthe Penn State's Leonard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The PI herselfis a female member of the faculty; she will continue to work with the Women in EngineeringProgram (WEP) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Penn State to recruit women andminorities for graduate study, and to encourage them to pursue academic careers aftergraduation.