Decentralized Control of Large Collaborative Swarms using Random Finite Set Theory

IEEE Controlling large swarms of robotic agents presents many challenges including, but not limited to, computational complexity due to a large number of agents, uncertainty in the functionality of each agent in the swarm, and uncertainty in the swarm's configuration. The contribution of this w...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Doerr, Bryce, Linares, Richard
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/135348
Description
Summary:IEEE Controlling large swarms of robotic agents presents many challenges including, but not limited to, computational complexity due to a large number of agents, uncertainty in the functionality of each agent in the swarm, and uncertainty in the swarm's configuration. The contribution of this work is to decentralize Random Finite Set (RFS)-based control of large collaborative swarms for controlling individual agents. The RFS-based control formulation assumes a Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) approximation and a complete topology for centralized swarm control. To generalize the control topology in a localized or decentralized manner, sparse LQR is used to sparsify the RFS-based control gain matrix obtained using iterative LQR. This allows agents to use information of agents near each other (localized topology) or only the agent's own information (decentralized topology) to make a control decision. Sparsity and performance for decentralized RFS-based control are compared for different degrees of localization in feedback control gains which show that the stability and performance compared to centralized control do not degrade significantly in provi