The Multi-Agent Rendezvous Problem. Part 2: The Asynchronous Case

This paper is concerned with the collective behavior of a group of $n>1$ mobile autonomous agents, labelled $1$ through $n$, which can all move in the plane. Each agent is able to continuously track the positions of all other agents currently within its “sensing region,” where by an agent's sensing region we mean a closed disk of positive radius $r$ centered at the agent's current position. The multi-agent rendezvous problem is to devise “local” control strategies, one for each agent, which without any active communication between agents cause all members of the group to eventually rendezvous at a single unspecified location. This paper describes a family of unsynchronized strategies for solving the problem. Correctness is established appealing to the concept of “analytic synchronization.”

[1]  Vicsek,et al.  Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles. , 1995, Physical review letters.

[2]  Marios M. Polycarpou,et al.  Stability analysis of one-dimensional asynchronous swarms , 2003, Proceedings of the 2001 American Control Conference. (Cat. No.01CH37148).

[3]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Feasible formations of multi-agent systems , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 American Control Conference. (Cat. No.01CH37148).

[4]  Jerrold E. Marsden,et al.  Basic Complex Analysis , 1973 .

[5]  Brian D. O. Anderson,et al.  The Multi-Agent Rendezvous Problem. Part 1: The Synchronous Case , 2007, SIAM J. Control. Optim..

[6]  Masafumi Yamashita,et al.  Distributed memoryless point convergence algorithm for mobile robots with limited visibility , 1999, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[7]  R. Sundaram A First Course in Optimization Theory: Bibliography , 1996 .

[8]  B. Anderson,et al.  A FRAMEWORK FOR MAINTAINING FORMATIONS BASED ON RIGIDITY , 2002 .

[9]  Gordon F. Royle,et al.  Algebraic Graph Theory , 2001, Graduate texts in mathematics.

[10]  Jie Lin,et al.  The multi-agent rendezvous problem , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[11]  John N. Tsitsiklis,et al.  Parallel and distributed computation , 1989 .

[12]  Nicola Santoro,et al.  Solving the Robots Gathering Problem , 2003, ICALP.

[13]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Modeling and control of formations of nonholonomic mobile robots , 2001, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[14]  Jerrold E. Marsden,et al.  Gyroscopic Forces and Collision Avoidance with Convex Obstacles , 2003 .

[15]  J. A. Fax,et al.  Graph Laplacians and Stabilization of Vehicle Formations , 2002 .

[16]  Masafumi Yamashita,et al.  Distributed Anonymous Mobile Robots: Formation of Geometric Patterns , 1999, SIAM J. Comput..

[17]  Peter N. Belhumeur,et al.  Closing ranks in vehicle formations based on rigidity , 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002..

[18]  Naomi Ehrich Leonard,et al.  Virtual leaders, artificial potentials and coordinated control of groups , 2001, Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.01CH37228).

[19]  Mireille E. Broucke,et al.  Local control strategies for groups of mobile autonomous agents , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[20]  Nicola Santoro,et al.  Gathering of asynchronous robots with limited visibility , 2005, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[21]  Luc Moreau,et al.  Stability of multiagent systems with time-dependent communication links , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[22]  B.D.O. Anderson,et al.  The multi-agent rendezvous problem - the asynchronous case , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[23]  Nicola Santoro,et al.  Distributed coordination of a set of autonomous mobile robots , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2000 (Cat. No.00TH8511).

[24]  Sonia Martínez,et al.  Robust rendezvous for mobile autonomous agents via proximity graphs in arbitrary dimensions , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[25]  Mireille E. Broucke,et al.  Local control strategies for groups of mobile autonomous agents , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[26]  Yang Liu,et al.  Stability analysis of one-dimensional asynchronous swarms , 2003, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[27]  Jie Lin,et al.  Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules , 2003, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[28]  C. O. Oakley,et al.  The Enjoyment of Mathematics. , 1957 .

[29]  Giuseppe Prencipe,et al.  CORDA : distributed coordination of a set of autonomous mobile robots , 2001 .