Seminar Details
2006-10-03 (14.00 pm) : "Control and information architectures for formations"
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Brian ANDERSON (Australian National University)
Abstract :
Formations of robots, underwater vehicles and autonomous airborne vehicles are
slowly being deployed to tackle problems in both civilian and military spheresbush
fire control, surveillance and the like. In many situations, it is desirable that
the formation members rendezvous, that they move in the same direction or even move
to maintain the formation shape while executing an overall change of location.; Other capabilities are to
change from one shape to another, perhaps to avoid an obstacle, and to split or merge with a different formation.
Living organisms, especially fish and birds, often exhibit this sort of behaviour.
The presentation will consider the types of control, communications and sensing
architecture that allow scalability for formations with many individual agents,
and allow preservation of the formation shape, merging, splitting, or closing ranks
in the event of loss of one or more agents. The scalability requirement imposes a
need for significant decentralization of information and control structures, and,
just as in a formation of birds, no one bird can be expected to watch all other birds and compute its
own trajectory using even partial knowledge of the trajectories of all other individual birds, so the amount
of sensing, communication and control computation by any one agent has to be limited.