Date of Award

Fall 12-2014

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering

Department

Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

Tianyu Yang

First Committee Member

Jing Wang

Second Committee Member

Ilteris Demirkiran

Abstract

In this thesis, we present practical experimental results to demonstrate a control law for consensus of multiagent systems with switching topologies and time delays. The nonlinear control law utilizes discontinuous cooperative control gains and uses contraction mapping to achieve consensus of multiagent systems. The testing platform we used consists of a number of mobile robots and software simulations both in Matlab and Microsoft Studio C++. We present the effectiveness of the control law design by Aria mobile robots with applications in distributed cooperative formation control. Computer simulations and hardware experiments presented include point consensus control and formation control, both with changing topologies and time-delays. In addition to 2D simulations and experiments, we also developed the 3D model for more practical applications, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Autonomous Underwater vehicles (AUVs). The research presented was supported by Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate (AFRL/RI)’s Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy program. The research presented in this thesis was included in multiple presentations to AFRL program managers, who provided very favorable feedback to our research. Recently, some of our research results was published in the proceedings of 2014 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology [1], and the paper received Best Paper Award at the conference. In addition, a poster presentation describing our research was made to ERAU College of Engineering’s Industry Advisory Board. The process of implementing the research results in AUVs has also been progressing significantly. Upon invitation, some hardware tests were performed as part of NASA NEEMO 19 (Extreme Environment Mission Operations) experiments, and were subsequently reported twice in the headlines of the Science and Education section in the Daytona Beach News Journal. Technical papers describing proposed cooperative control in AUVs were submitted to 2015 ACM and IEEE conferences. . .

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