Abstract :
Summary form only for tutorial. The increasing power of computational resources makes possible the development of autonomous control systems that are capable of dealing with the complex task of path planning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Autonomous vehicles have applications in military operations, search and rescue, environment monitoring, commercial cleaning, material handling, and homeland security. While single vehicles performing solo missions will yield some benefits, greater benefits will come from the cooperation of teams of vehicles. One motivation for multiple autonomous vehicles is to achieve the same gains for mechanically controlled systems as has been gained in distributed computation. Rather than having a single monolithic (and therefore expensive and complicated) machine do everything, the hope is that many inexpensive, simple machines, can achieve the same or enhanced functionality, through coordination. There are numerous applications for cooperative control of multiple autonomous vehicles including space-based interferometry, future autonomous combat systems, autonomous household appliances, enhanced surveillance systems, hazardous material handling systems, and active reconfigurable sensing systems. The purpose of this workshop is overview the state of the art research in cooperative control of multiple autonomous vehicles. The presenters have been actively involved in this area over the past several years. Throughout the workshop the presenters will demonstrate both theoretical and experimental results in cooperative control. In particular, formation and non-formation type cooperative control problems will be introduced. Distributed consensus algorithms and their applications in multi-vehicle coordination will be presented. Recent research in autonomy and cooperation for small unmanned air vehicles will be presented.
