Multilevel hypernetworks in the design of complex multirobot control systems

Increasingly engineering involves systems with many autonomous subsystems and agents. Understanding and controlling such systems is beyond the abilities of traditional control methods. The issues are well captured by the design and control of robot soccer systems. Hypernetworks generalize networks to relations between more than two items. They can be used to model multilevel relational structure, and it is shown how they can be applied to robot soccer systems. Some structural configurations are more disposed to good or bad outcomes than others, and these can be used in the control process. The theory is developed from first principles and illustrated by experiments performed in our laboratory.