An Immunity Inspired Real-Time Cooperative Control Framework for Networked Multi-agent Systems
ICARIS '09 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems
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This special issue of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization is motivated by the emerging disciplines of multi-agent networks, distributed motion coordination, and cooperative control. It is foreseen that, in the near future, large numbers of coordinated devices communicating through ad hoc networks will perform a variety of challenging sensing tasks. The potential advantages of employing arrays of sensors are numerous: certain tasks are difficult, if not impossible, when performed by a single agent; and a group of agents inherently provides robustness to failures of single agents or communication links. Although the individual components of these networked systems are increasingly sophisticated, we lack a fundamental understanding of how to assemble and coordinate the individual physical devices into a coherent whole. As a consequence of this limitation, there exists a strong need for the integration of the sensing, computing and networking aspects of coordinated control of networks. This special issue gathers recent developments aimed at providing new sets of control and distributed optimization tools to address the research challenges posed by multi-agent networks. This volume presents 16 papers that deal with a wide range of coordination tasks such as consensus, connectivity maintenance, spatial process estimation, formation stabilization, localization, coverage, and target detection. The topics considered include the characterization of convergence speeds, the design of algorithms that tolerate delays, noisy measurements, and packet drops, and the study of the controllability of graph structures and the influence of the interconnection topology in the control design. Collectively, the papers detail deep connections between a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including cooperative, distributed and decentralized control theory, distributed algorithms and systems, communication networks, graph theory, geometric optimization, differential and computational geometry, game and learning theory, and process estimation. We believe this special issue contains an excellent sample of current research on multi-agent networks and we envision that it will be of great interest to the broad readership of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. A million thanks are due to all the authors who submitted their work to this special issue. We would also like to thank the proficient and timely editorial support provided by Brian Fauth and Mitch Chernoff and the insightful and gracious advice that we received from the editor-in-chief, John Baillieul.