Topology-preserving flocking of nonlinear agents using optimistic planning

Lucian Busoniu (1) , Irinel-Constantin Morarescu (2)

1 UTCN - Universitatea Tehnica din Cluj-Napoca
2 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy

We consider the generalized flocking problem in multiagent systems, where the agents must drive a subset of their state variables to common values, while communication is constrained by a proximity relationship in terms of another subset of variables. We build a flocking method for general nonlinear agent dynamics, by using at each agent a near-optimal control technique from artificial intelligence called optimistic planning. By defining the rewards to be optimized in a well-chosen way, the preservation of the interconnection topology is guaranteed, under a controllability assumption. We also give a practical variant of the algorithm that does not require to know the details of this assumption, and show that it works well in experiments on nonlinear agents.

Mots clés: Optimistic planning; Flocking; Topology preservation; Multiagent systems

Domaines: Automatique

Lucian Busoniu, Irinel-Constantin Morarescu. Topology-preserving flocking of nonlinear agents using optimistic planning. Control Theory and Technology, 2015, 13 (1), pp.70-81. ⟨10.1007/s11768-015-4107-5⟩. ⟨hal-01133949⟩