Geometry, optimization and control in robot coordination

Motion coordination is an extraordinary phenomenon in biological systems and a powerful tool in man-made systems; although individual agents have no global system knowledge, complex behaviors emerge from local interactions. This talk focuses on robotic networks, that is, group of robots that communicate and coordinate their motions to perform useful tasks. Example tasks are how to respond to service requests in an environment, how to deploy sensor nodes in locations of interest, and how to partition an environment among cooperating agents. For these tasks, we propose a comprehensive collection of adaptive and distributed algorithms, including a novel a novel deployment and partitioning algorithm with minimal communication requirements. Our approach integrates concepts from queuing and stochastic analysis, geometric optimization, and nonlinear stability theory.