Plenary lecture: Control and information architectures for formations

Summary form only given. The presentation will consider the types of control, communications and sensing architecture that allow scalability for formations with many individual agents, and allow preservation of the formation shape, merging, splitting, or closing ranks in the event of loss of one or more agents. The scalability requirement imposes a need for significant decentralization of information and control structures, and, just as in a formation of birds, no one bird can be expected to watch all other birds and compute its own trajectory using even partial knowledge of the trajectories of all other individual birds, so the amount of sensing, communication and control computation by any one agent has to be limited.