A method of cooperative control using occasional non-local interactions

Abstract

Current approaches to distributed control involving many robots generally restrict interactions to pairs of robots within a threshold distance. While this allows for provable stability, there are performance costs associated with the lack of long-distance information. We introduce the acute angle switching algorithm, which allows a small number of long-range interactions in addition to interactions with nearby neighbors, without sacrificing provable stability. We prove several formal properties of the acute angle switching algorithm, including system-wide connectivity. Further, we show simulation results demonstrating the efficacy and robustness of multi-robot systems based on the acute angle switching algorithm