Environment-Agent Interaction in Autonomous Networked Teams with Applications to Minimum-Time Coordinated Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The research objective of this award is to develop motion coordination and path-planning algorithms for small/micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs/MAVs) using appropriate, state-dependent performance metrics that capture the interactions of the vehicle with the environment, the mission objectives, as well as the system-theoretic attributes of the network. The environment includes both the ambient conditions (e.g., winds) as well as the actual, or perceived, adversarial behavior of any opponents operating in the vicinity of the vehicle. A key concept that will play a major role in developing these results will be the generalized (Zermelo) Voronoi diagrams which can capture the dynamics of the state of the agents in the network (e.g., estimated-time-of-arrival, path curvature constraints) much better than traditional Voronoi diagrams that are based solely on Euclidean distance. With the help of these diagrams, the proximity relations between different agents and/or between the agents and a set of targets will be characterized, and decentralized and distributed control strategies will be developed. If successful, the results of this research will enable small-scale autonomous aerial, marine or underwater vehicles to operate in teams towards a common objective such as environmental monitoring, distributed surveillance, multiple target allocation, coordinated target pursuit, etc. in the presence of locally strong winds or currents and with limited on-board power and computational resources. Owing to their small size, the trajectories of these aerial platforms are strongly influenced by the prevailing winds, as well as the limitations imposed by the available on-board resources. The tools to be developed in this research will also find application in other areas of networked controlled systems, where intelligent agents must cooperate to perform their mission, a task that would be infeasible if it were to be undertaken by a single member of the team. Graduate and undergraduate engineering students as well as local high school teachers will benefit from their involvement in this research through NSF?s REU and RET projects and through Georgia Tech?s PURA and Dash undergraduate research fellowship programs.