Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Optimal Control

摘要

Cooperative control systems are increasingly emerging as significant alternatives to their centralized counterparts. The rising interest in deploying cooperative systems is fueled by the development of decentralized systems with low cost and performance advantages. For example, mobile exploration and information gathering tasks can often be accomplished cheaply and more reliably by swarms of small autonomous robots as opposed to a single more sophisticated one. Cooperative control is also applied in many tasks that can not be performed by a single system, e.g. satellite arrays that enable global communication, geographically remote systems that communicate via network and others. The goal of our research is to investigate optimal control in cooperative systems, using algorithms inspired from biology. We begin with a review of collective behavior in biological systems.