| In cooperative control for a multi-agent system, agents coordinate and communicate to achieve a collective goal (e.g., flocking, consensus, or pattern formation). As agents move to perform desired missions, ensuring the group remains close enough to maintain wireless communication (i.e., the group does not partition) is a great challenge in a decentralized control manner. The focus of this dissertation is to develop potential field based decentralized controllers for a group of agents with limited sensing and communication capabilities to perform required mission objectives while preserving network connectivity.;Artificial potential field based controllers are developed in Chapter 2 to maintain existing links connected in both low and high level graphs and ensure that a group of agents switch from one connected configuration to another without disconnecting the underlying network in process. In Chapter 3, based on the navigation function formalism, a decentralized control method is designed to enable a group of agents to achieve a desired global configuration from a given connected initial graph with desired neighborhood be- tween agents, while maintaining global network connectivity and avoiding obstacles, using only local feedback and no radio communication between the agents for navigation. In Chapter 4, a novel strategy using a prefix labeling and routing algorithm and a navigation function based control scheme is developed to achieve a desired formation for a group of identical agents from an arbitrarily connected initial graph. A decentralized continuous time-varying controller based on a modified dipolar navigation function is developed in Chapter 5 to reposition and reorient those mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints to a common setpoint with a desired orientation while maintaining network connectivity during the evolution, using only local sensing feedback from its one-hop neighbors. The work in Chapter 6 investigates and influences emotions of people in a social network, where a distributed controller is designed to achieve emotion synchronization for a group of individuals in a social network (i.e., an agreement on the emotion states of all individuals). Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation by summarizing the work and discussing some remaining open problems that required further investigation. (Full text of this dissertation may be available via the University of Florida Libraries web site. Please check http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/etd.html)... |
