Distributed control design for multi-agent systems and cooperative robots

未来的民用和军用救援任务将依赖于在动态、资源受限的对抗性环境中运行的大型、联网的小型车辆和传感器小组。这种类型的小组通常在很少或没有直接人工监督的情况下运作，并且将非常困难，如果不是不可能的话，通过编程或远程操作来有效地管理或控制。因此，这种大型车辆群的管理将极具挑战性，需要整合通信、控制、计算和传感，特别是为指挥和控制大规模、自主运作的车辆群而量身定做。为了应对这些挑战，我们建议开展一个基础广泛的跨学科研究项目，在该项目中，我们将开发和研究联网的自主代理小组。我们的目标是开发最短时间的重新配置问题，这在救援任务中是一个非常重要的问题。它也是

Future civilian and military rescue missions will rely on large, networked groups of small vehicles and sensors operating in dynamic, resource-constrained, adversarial environments. Groups of this type will typically operate with little or no direct human supervision and will be very difficult, if not impossible, to efficiently manage or control by programming or by tele-operation. Management of such large groups will thus be extremely challenging and will require integration of communication, control, computation and sensing, specifically tailored to the command and control of large-scale, autonomously functioning vehicle groups. To address these challenges, we propose to embark on a broadly-based, cross-disciplinary research program in which we will develop and study networked groups of autonomous agents. Our goal is to develop a minimum-time reconfiguration problem which is a matter of grave importance in rescue missions. It is also