Bruce A. Francis

This brief describes the coordinated control of groups of robots using only sensory input – and no direct external commands. Furthermore, each robot employs the same local strategy, i.e., there are no leaders, and the text also deals with decentralized control, allowing for cases in which no single robot can sense all the others. One can get intuition for the problem from the natural world, for example, flocking birds. How do they achieve and maintain their flying formation? Recognizing their importance as the most basic coordination tasks for mobile robot networks, the brief details flocking and rendezvous. They are shown to be physical illustrations of emergent behaviors with global consensus arising from local interactions. The authors extend the consideration of these fundamental ideas to describe their operation in flying robots and prompt readers to pursue further research in the field. Flocking and Rendezvous in Distributed Robotics will provide graduate students a firm grounding in the subject, while also offering an authoritative reference work for more experienced workers seeking a brief but thorough treatment of an area that has rapidly gained in interest.

Among the many techniques for designing linear multivariable analogue controllers, the two most popular optimal ones are H2 and H-infinity optimization. The fact that most new industrial controllers are digital provides strong motivation for adapting or extending these techniques to digital control systems. This book, now available as a corrected reprint, attempts to do so. Part I presents two indirect methods of sampled-data controller design: These approaches include approximations to a real problem, which involves an analogue plant, continuous-time performance specifications, and a sampled-data controller. Part II proposes a direct attack in the continuous-time domain, where sampled-data systems are time-varying. The findings are presented in forms that can readily be programmed in, e.g., MATLAB.

This book incorporates data rate issues that arise in control design for systems involving communication networks. The general setup is that, given a plant, a communication channel with limited data rate and control objectives, one must find a controller that uses the channel in the feedback loop to achieve the control objectives. The theoretical question of interest is to find the minimum data rate necessary for the channel. This book is motivated by the recent developments in communication technology and aims at engineers and scientists in this field. The use of networks has become common practice in many control applications connecting sensors/actuators to controllers. The book therefore provides the fundamentals of the networks used in control systems, based on hybrid systems theory. The book focuses on the use of networks in distributed systems and on quantization in messages sent over networks.