Analysis and design tools for distributed motion coordination

This paper surveys recently-developed theoretical tools for the analysis and design of coordination algorithms for networks of mobile autonomous agents. First, various motion coordination tasks are encoded into aggregate cost functions from geometric optimization. Second, the limited communication capabilities of the mobile agents are modeled via the notions of proximity graphs from computational geometry and of spatially distributed maps. Finally, we illustrate how to apply these tools to design and analyze scalable cooperative strategies in a variety of motion coordination problems such as deployment, rendezvous, and flocking.