Antonio Adaldo

Event-Triggered Pinning Control of Switching Networks

This paper investigates event-triggered pinning control for the synchronization of complex networks of nonlinear dynamical systems. We consider networks described by time-varying weighted graphs and featuring generic linear interaction protocols. Sufficient conditions for the absence of Zeno behavior are derived and exponential convergence of a global normed error function is proven. Static networks are considered as a special case, wherein the existence of a lower bound for interevent times is also proven. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Event-triggered pinning control of complex networks with switching topologies

This paper investigates the problem of event-triggered pinning control for the synchronization of networks of nonlinear dynamical agents onto a desired reference trajectory. The pinned agents are those that have access to the reference trajectory. We consider both static and switching topologies. We prove that the system is well posed and identify conditions under which the network achieves exponential convergence. A lower bound for the rate of convergence is also derived. Numerical examples demonstrating the effectiveness of the results are provided.

Control of multi-agent systems with event-triggered cloud access

This paper investigates a multi-agent formation control problem with event-triggered control updates and additive disturbances. The agents communicate only by exchanging information in a cloud repository. The communication with the cloud is considered a shared and limited resource, and therefore it is used intermittently and asynchronously by the agents. The proposed approach takes advantage of having a shared asynchronous cloud support while guaranteeing a reduced number of communication. More in detail, each agent schedules its own sequence of cloud accesses in order to achieve a coordinated network goal. A control law is given with a criterion for scheduling the control updates recursively. The closed loop scheme is proven to be effective in achieving the control objective and a numerical simulation corroborates the theoretical results.

Cooperative coverage for surveillance of 3D structures

In this article, we propose a planning algorithm for coverage of complex structures with a network of robotic sensing agents, with multi-robot surveillance missions as our main motivating application. The sensors are deployed to monitor the external surface of a 3D structure. The algorithm controls the motion of each sensor so that a measure of the collective coverage attained by the network is nondecreasing, while the sensors converge to an equilibrium configuration. A modified version of the algorithm is also provided to introduce collision avoidance properties. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated in a simulation and validated experimentally by executing the planned paths on an aerial robot.

Coordination of Multi-agent Systems with Intermittent Access to a Cloud Repository

A cloud-supported multi-agent system is composed of autonomous agents required to achieve a common coordination objective by exchanging data over a shared cloud repository. The repository is accessed asychronously by different agents, and direct inter-agent commuication is not possible. This model is motivated by the problem of coordinating a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles , with the aim to avoid the use of expensive and power-hungry modems for underwater communication. For the case of agents with integrator dynamics, a control law and a rule for scheduling the cloud access are formally defined and proven to achieve the desired coordination. A numerical simulation corroborate the theoretical results.

Cloud-Supported Formation Control of Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems

This paper addresses a formation problem for a network of autonomous agents with second-order dynamics and bounded disturbances. Coordination is achieved by having the agents asynchronously upload (download) data to (from) a shared repository, rather than directly exchanging data with other agents. Well-posedness of the closed-loop system is demonstrated by showing that there exists a lower bound for the time interval between two consecutive agent accesses to the repository. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical results.

Finite-time attitude synchronization with a discontinuous protocol

A finite-time attitude synchronization problem is considered in this paper where the rotation of each rigid body is expressed using the axis-angle representation. One simple discontinuous and distributed controller using the vectorized signum function is proposed. This controller only involves the sign of the state differences of adjacent neighbors. In order to avoid the singularity introduced by the axis-angular representation, an extra constraint is added to the initial condition. It is proved that for some initial conditions, the control law achieves finite-time attitude synchronization. One simulated example is provided to verify the usage of the control protocol designed in this paper.

Multi-agent trajectory tracking with self-triggered cloud access

This paper presents a cloud-supported control algorithm for coordinated trajectory tracking of networked autonomous agents. The motivating application is the coordinated control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. The control objective is to have the vehicles track a reference trajectory while keeping an assigned formation. Rather than relying on inter-agent communication, which is interdicted underwater, coordination is achieved by letting the agents intermittently access a shared information repository hosted on a cloud. An event-based law is proposed to schedule the accesses of each agent to the cloud. We show that, with the proposed scheduling of the cloud accesses, the agents achieve the required coordination objective. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical results.