Cooperative Control

Are there universal principles of coordinated group motion and if so what might they be? This carefully edited book presents how natural groupings such as fish schools, bird flocks, deer herds etc. coordinate themselves and move so flawlessly, often without an apparent leader or any form of centralized control. It shows how the underlying principles of cooperative control may be used for groups of mobile autonomous agents to help enable a large group of autonomous robotic vehicles in the air, on land or sea or underwater, to collectively accomplish useful tasks such as distributed, adaptive scientific data gathering, search and rescue, or reconnaissance. TOC:The Geometry of Sensor Information Utilization in Nonlinear Feedback Control of Vehicle Formations.- Determining Environmental Boundaries: Asynchronous Communication and Physical Scales.- Adaptive and Distributed Coordination Algorithms for Mobile Sensing Networks.- Optimization-Based Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems.- Modeling and Analysis of Cooperative Control Systems for Uninhabited Autonomous Vehicles.- Extracting Interactive Control Algorithms from Group Dynamics of Schooling Fish.- Cooperative Control of Large Systems.- Pursuit Strategies for Autonomous Agents.- Decentralized Coordination with Local Interactions: Some New Directions.- Coordination Variables and Consensus Building in Multiple Vehicle Systems.- Collective Motion and Oscillator Synchronization.- A Study of Synchronization and Group Cooperation Using Partial Contraction Theory.- Flocking in Teams of Nonholonomic Agents.- Cooperative Control for Localization of Mobile Sensor Networks.- The Multi-Agent Rendezvous Problem.