Control and Optimization for Event-triggered Networked Autonomous Multi-agent Systems

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The well-known phrase - a champion team will defeat a team of champions - gives insight as to why research on cooperative control of multi-agent systems is seen as one of the most promising and exciting directions in current and future engineering technology. Teams of robotic agents cooperate and interact with each other to complete tasks such as search and rescue, surveillance coverage over a large area or environmental monitoring. Key to this is development of distributed control algorithms for each agent that collectively achieves the global objective.This project will advance existing results in distributed control algorithms and make new contributions by studying the energy cost of implementing the algorithms. Firstly, the framework of event-based control will be used to reduce energy consumption by sensing and actuating only when required, as opposed to most existing algorithms, which actuate and sense continuously. Furthermore, unlike existing results, we will study agents with complex robot dynamics. Secondly, the project will consider the energy consumed in achieving the cooperative task. Optimal controllers for different coordination tasks, such as formation control, will be designed to reduce energy consumption; currently only consensus tasks have been considered. Going beyond this, sophisticated measures of energy costs related agent technologies will be incorporated.The complementarity in skills of the groups led by PI Yu and PI Hirche means the groups are perfectly suited for collaboration on this project. PI Yu and the HDU team have particular strengths in formation control and distributed coordination and PI Hirche and the TUM team are known for their theoretical contributions to optimal control, event-based control and robotics. Given past successful collaborations, and the complementary of world-leading skills, we believe this project will also be successful in producing great research contributions.