Event triggered distributed collaborative control

We consider the collaborative control of a group of autonomous mobile agents. Building upon our earlier work we consider the communication needs and connectivity of the agents' network as they move. We develop algorithms that automatically sense the possibility of connectivity loss among the agents. We also consider the automatic detection of path disconnection when more than one path need to be maintained between pairs of agents. Using local probing schemes we formulate such problems as event-triggered control problems. We develop distributed algorithms that automatically select some agents and move them appropriately so as to maintain certain degree of desired connectivity among the moving agents. We characterize the trade-off between the gain from maintaining a certain degree of connectivity vs. the combined cost of communications and the associated dynamic re-positioning of agents. The results illustrate the efficiency achieved by event-triggered control in such problems. We also describe the resulting communication topologies and in particular their similarity to dynamic small world topologies.