Event-triggered and cloud-support control of multi-robot systems

Sammanfattning: In control of multi-robot systems, the aim is to obtain a coordinated behavior through local interactions among the robots. A multi-agent system is an abstract model of a multi-robot system. In this thesis, we investigate multi-agent systems where inter-agent communication is modeled by discrete events triggered by conditions on the internal state of the agents. We consider two models of communication. In the first model, two agents exchange information directly with each other. In the second model, all information is exchanged asynchronously over a shared repository. Four contributions on control algorithms for multi-agent systems are offered in the thesis. The first contribution is an event-triggered pinning control algorithm for a network of agents with nonlinear dynamics and time-varying topology. Pinning control is a strategy to steer the behavior of the system in a desired manner by controlling only a small fraction of the agents. We express the controllability of the network in terms of an average value of the network connectivity over time, and we show that all the agents can be driven to a desired reference trajectory. The second contribution is a control algorithm for multi-agent systems where inter-agent communication is substituted with a shared remote repository hosted on a cloud. The communication between each agent and the cloud is modeled as a sequence of events scheduled recursively by the agent. We quantify the connectivity of the network and we show that it is possible to synchronize the multi-agent system to the same state trajectory, while guaranteeing that two consecutive cloud accesses by the same agent are separated by a lower-bounded time interval. The third contribution is a family of distributed controllers for coverage and surveillance tasks with a network of mobile agents with anisotropic sensing patterns. We develop an abstract model of the environment under inspection and define a measure of the coverage attained by the sensor network. We show that the network attains nondecreasing coverage, and we characterize the equilibrium configurations of the network. The fourth contribution is a distributed, cloud-supported control algorithm for inspection of 3D structures with a network of mobile sensing agents, similar to those considered in the third contribution. We develop an abstract model of the structure to inspect and quantify the degree of completion of the inspection. We demonstrate that, under the proposed algorithm, the network is guaranteed to complete the inspection in finite time. All results presented in the thesis are corroborated by numerical simulations and sometimes by experiments with aerial robotic platforms. The experiments show that the theory and methods developed in the thesis are of practical relevance.