Dynamic Routing and Coordination in Multi-Agent Networks

Abstract

Supported by this project, we designed innovative routing, planning and coordination strategies for robotic networks and studied their application to Army and DoD scenarios. The key technological challenge is the decision of who does what, when or, equivalently, how are tasks partitioned among robots, in what order are they to be performed, and along which deterministic routes or according to which stochastic rules do individual robots move. The fundamental novelties and our recent breakthroughs supported by this project are manifold: (1) the application of queueing theory and combinatorial techniques to network of autonomous robots leads to a wide range of new relevant problems, (2) novel coordination schemes promise to successfully achieve various optimization objectives relying only upon asynchronous and asymmetric communication, (3) the increasingly weaker assumptions imposed on routing and coordination algorithms are rendering them practical and widely applicable. This project addressed multi-dimensional problems of relevance in Engineering and Computer Science by unifying fundamental concepts from multiple domains (robotics, autonomy, combinatorics, and network science). Our work aimed to bridge multiple scientific disciplines, including control theory and theoretical computer science and their applications to multi-agent systems, robotics and sensor networks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 10, 2016
Accession Number
AD1010873

Entities

People

  • Francesco Bullo

Organizations

  • University of California, Santa Barbara

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Science
  • Control Systems
  • Convex Programming
  • Department Of Defense
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Engineering
  • Markov Chains
  • Network Science
  • Operations Research
  • Optimization
  • Probability
  • Random Walk
  • Simplex Method
  • Students
  • Theoretical Computer Science

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control