Time-Inverted Kuramoto Model Meets Lissajous Curves: Multi-Robot Persistent Monitoring and Target Detection

This letter proposes a distributed strategy to achieve both persistent monitoring and target detection in a rectangular and obstacle-free environment. Each robot has to repeatedly follow a smooth trajectory and avoid collisions with other robots. To achieve this goal, we rely on the time-inverted Kuramoto dynamics and the use of Lissajous...

Distributed Aperiodic Time-Triggered and Event-Triggered Consensus: A Scalability Viewpoint

We revisit distributed sampled-data consensus problems from a scalability point of view. Existing solutions in the literature for estimating the maximum sampling interval that preserves stability rely on the Lyapunov functional method. With this method, the overall closed-loop system (i.e. the overall network of agents) is treated as a time...

Logic-based distributed switching control for agents in power-chained form with multiple unknown control directions

This work studies logic-based distributed switching control for nonlinear agents in power-chained form, where logic-based (switching) control arises from the online estimation of the control directions assumed to be unknown for all agents. Compared to the state-of-the-art logic-based mechanisms, the challenge of power-chained dynamics is that...

A unified Lloyd-based framework for multi-agent collective behaviours

Different authors have addressed a number of problems in the area of distributed control proposing convincing solutions to specific problems such as static coverage, dynamic coverage/exploration, rendezvous, flocking, formation control. However, a major limitation of problem-specific approaches is a fundamental lack of flexibility when the...

Scenario-based defense mechanism against vulnerabilities in Lagrange-based DMPC

In this paper, we present an analysis of the vulnerability of a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme in the context of cyber-security. We consider different types of the so-called insider attacks. In particular, we consider the situation where one of the local controllers sends false information to others to manipulate costs for...

Distributed control of heterogeneous underactuated mechanical systems

We show how passivity-based control by interconnection and damping assignment (IDA-PBC) can be used as a design procedure to derive distributed control laws for undirected connected networks of underactuated and fully-actuated heterogeneous mechanical systems. With or without leaders, agents are able to reach a stationary formation in the...