Recent Research in Cooperative Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems

Richard M. Murray
Control and Dynamical Systems
California Institute of Technology

Submitted, ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control
Special issue on the "Analysis and Control of Multi Agent Dynamic Systems"
May 2006

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of recent research in cooperative control of multi-vehicle systems, using a common mathematical framework to allow different methods to be compared to each other. The survey has three primary parts: an overview of current applications of cooperative control, an summary of some of the key technical approaches that have been explored, and a description of some possible future directions for research. The articles that are used as a basis for this survey have been chosen in part based on their citation frequency and hence represent some of the seminal papers in the field.

Note: this page contains links to most (hopefully all) of the papers used for the review and is intended as a working document for the preparation of the article. A copy of the submitted version of the article will be posted here when it is available.

Applications Overview

Military

• UAV Cooperative Control, P. R. Chandler, M. Packter and S. Rasmussen. Proceedings, American Control Conference, 2001. 38 citations.
  • High level paper with good sample applications (cooperative attack, cooperative surveillance)
  • Uses hierarchical approach (breaks tasks down into subteams); no technical results included

Technology Overview

Formation Control

Keeping a set of vehicles in a formation, including swarms and string stability

• Designing Control Laws for Cooperative Agent Teams, Lynne E. Parker. Proceedings, IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1993. 78 citations
  • One of the very early papers on formation control
  • Discusses local versus global knowledge; distributed control
  • Pretty high level, with some examples (experiments?) but not much data
• D'Andrea formation flight work (spatially invariant)
  • Distributed Control Design for Systems Interconnected Over an Arbitrary Graph
• String Stability:
  • String stability of interconnected systems, Swaroop and Hedrick
• Swarms
  • Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules, Jadbabaie, Lin, Morse

Cooperative Tasking/Resource Allocation

• Co-ordination and Control of Multiple UAVs, A. Richards, J. Bellingham, M. Tillerson and J. How. AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit, 2002. 59 citations
  • Task allocation and motion planning using the MILP framework

• Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Control Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming, M. G. Earl and R. D'Andrea. Submitted, IEEE Transactions on Automatica Control, 2005. 6 citations.
  • Centralized solution to N-on-M game using MILP. Good references.
  • Reference this paper along with J. How work.
• Parker, Alliance paper

Spatio-Temporal Control

Rendezvous

• Cooperative Control of UAV Rendezvous, T. W. McLain, P. R. Chandler, S. Rasmussen and M. Pachter. Proceedings, American Control Conference, 2001. 40 citations
  • Hierarchical approach: high level assignment, followed by planning then executaiton
  • Simulation study focused on rendezvous, using manager agent to coordinate time
• A framework for Lyapunov certificates for multi-vehicle rendezvous problems, Bhattacharya et al

Coverage

• Coverage Control for Mobile Sensing Networks, Cortes, Martinez, Bullo

Collision avoidance

• Conflict Resolution for Air Traffic Management: A Study in Multi-Agent Hybrid Systems, Tomlin et al