Taxonomies of Interconnected Systems: Asymmetry and Directedness in Multi-Agent Interactions

Date: 
Monday, 29 June, 2015
Place: 
Chicago, USA
Hosting conference: 
ACC 2015
Organizers: 
Andrea Gasparri
Abstract: 
Interconnected systems have become the recent focus of intense investigation, particularly in the context of autonomous collaboration (such as in multi-robot or sensor systems), affording fundamental advantages in adaptability, scalability, and efficiency compared to classical single-agent solutions. As recent work has demonstrated, investigations are far-reaching across various disciplines, ranging from sampling, tracking, and coverage, mobility and topology control, to general agent agreement problems. In this workshop, we will focus on the peculiarities arising from directedness and asymmetry in pairwise agent-to-agent interactions. These properties represent an important area of focus for the control community, especially in recent years, in order to capture a more realistic modeling of interconnected systems. Indeed, typical modes of communication, mobility, and sensing exhibit limitations which render the common undirectedness assumption often too restrictive, e.g., limited field of view of sensor elements or anisotropic radiation of antennas. Our goal is to develop a taxonomy of control design methodologies currently used in the context of asymmetric/directed interactions and identify the fundamental features of this challenging setting.