Fault-Tolerant Multiagent Robotic Formation Control Exploiting System Symmetries

Authors: Bill Goodwine and Panos Antsaklis

The 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011)

Abstract:

This paper extends some prior work by the
authors to address general robustness of solutions in multiagent
coordination control problems. In particular, it focuses on
fault-tolerant formation control. In our prior work, symmetries
in the system were exploited to simplify the nonlinear Lyapunov
stability analysis for symmetric systems. The type of symmetry
considered is a discrete symmetry where the system is composed
of many repeated instances of interacting identical agents. The
results are based on Lyapunov methods, and hence are of
general applicability and specifically these results are applicable
to both distributed as well as non-distributed coordination
methods. This paper considers the same types of systems
and extends the stability results to the cases of robustness of
formation stability under failure of individual agents.