(2015 ipeia 15) d"ryz ,oeiqa g''k
Title:
Cyclic Pursuit: Variants and Applications
Speaker:
Dwaipayan Mukherjee
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Technion
Time:
Monday, June 15, 2015, 14:00 Refreshments will be served before the seminar
Place:
Room 165, Aerospace Engineering, Technion
Abstract: The classical n-bugs problem has attracted considerable attention from researchers. This problem stems from the study of movement of a group of animals. In the context of multi-agent systems the problem has been modeled as cyclic pursuit. Under this paradigm, every agent, indexed i, chases its unique leader, agent i + 1 (modulo n), with n being the total number of agents. In this talk, some variants of the classical cyclic pursuit and some applications of the same will be covered. The first variant discussed is the generalized deviated cyclic pursuit where each agent may pursue its leader along a direction that is deviated from the line of sight and these angles can be different for the agents. Next, hierarchical cyclic pursuit will be discussed, where there are groups of agents in cyclic pursuit each pursuing a leader group. The set of points where the agents may rendezvous (reachable set) expands in both of these variants. As an extension to a realistic application, the importance of expansion in reachable set vis-a-vis capturing a moving target will then be highlighted. Agents with double integrator dynamics will also be considered. Another application, that of tracking the boundaries of unknown regions, will be presented. This problem is especially important in monitoring forest fire, marine contamination, volcanic ash eruptions. Lastly, discrete time cyclic pursuit laws will be analyzed to obtain results similar to the continuous time counterparts that exist in the literature. Heterogeneous gains and deviations are admitted similar to the continuous time version considered earlier. In case of discrete time systems, loss of synchronization is a very realistic scenario. This talk will present some results on the stability of such asynchronous cyclic pursuit systems and indicates that special precautions are needed for dealing with heterogeneous cyclic pursuit systems even when one gain is negative, since the system may not converge, depending on the initial positions of the agents and the sequence of updates.
