Ji, Meng (Georgia Inst. of Tech.), Egerstedt, Magnus (Georgia Inst. of Tech.), Ferrari-Trecate, Giancarlo (Univ. degli Studi di Pavia), Buffa, Annalisa (C.N.R.)

Hierarchical Containment Control in Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

Scheduled for presentation during the Mini-Symposium "Control and estimation of multiagent systems" (ThP11), Thursday, July 27, 2006, 16:10−16:35, Room 104a

17th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, July 24-28, 2006, Kyoto, Japan

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on May 19, 2024

Abstract

In this paper, the multi-agent containment problem is investigated. In particular, we focus our efforts on a continuation of our previous work on leader-follower networks, by imposing a hierarchical structure on the network topology. The main idea is to organize the team of autonomous, mobile agents in a multi-layered structure, which enables us to understand the tradeoffs between performance and complexity of the hierarchical topology, and we achieve this in the setting where we drive the collection of mobile agents to a target location while guaranteeing containment. In other words, the movement should be such that each layer stays within the convex hull of its parent layer while keeping its child layer inside its own convex hull. Such a criteria is to ensure that the movement of all the agents is constrained to a limited area while the group is moving. The application of this arises, for example, in surveillance, demining, and hazardous materials removing.