Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Sonia Martinez Diaz

Multi-agent systems, such as groups of mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, and large-scale information systems, possess unique characteristics that make their analysis and control a challenging problem. Like in biological populations, each member of the group should react to local information while producing meaningful global emerging behaviors. In this talk, I will present some recent ideas for the cooperative control and coordination of multi-agent systems. In particular, we will discuss how flocking algorithms are also useful for modeling multicellular aggregation. We illustrate how mathematical tools from operations research, complexity theory, dynamical systems and other disciplines can play a key role in the design and performance analysis of such systems.