Global Rigidity and Distributed Cooperative Control of Multivehicle Systems

Reza Olfati-Saber, Control and Dynamical Systems, California Insitute of Technology

Coordination of multivehicle systems is currently an important area of research due to its numerous applications in automated highway systems, distributed sensory networks, formation flight, flocking, automated search and rescue operation, team-on-team competitive games (e.g. robotic soccer/capture-the-flag), and various military missions.

This talk focuses on coordination of a network of vehicles for the purpose of performing specific missions in a cooperative and distributed manner. Each vehicle in the network is equipped with its own sensing/actuation, computational, and communication devices.

We show how the theories of graph rigidity and graph foldability combined (i.e. global rigidity) can be used to represent multivehicle formations as formation graphs. This provides an appropriate representation of reconfiguration and split/rejoin maneuvers for multivehicle system in a hybrid system framework. Each discrete-state of this hybrid system is a formation graph. Moreover, formation graphs can be used to automatically construct potential functions/cost functionals that if reduced/optimized lead to execution of a desired mission (e.g. tracking in formation) in a distributed manner.