Related papers: A Multiscale Analysis of Multi-Agent Coverage Cont…
This article introduces a decentralized robust optimization framework for safe multi-agent control under uncertainty. Although stochastic noise has been the primary form of modeling uncertainty in such systems, these formulations might fall…
We review a body of recent work by the author and collaborators on controlling the spatial organisation of large agent populations across multiple scales. A central theme is the systematic bridging of microscopic agent-level dynamics and…
The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…
Swarms of drones are being more and more used in many practical scenarios, such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, search and rescue in hardly-accessible areas, etc.. While a single drone can be guided by a human operator, the…
This study highlights the potential of image-based reinforcement learning methods for addressing swarm-related tasks. In multi-agent reinforcement learning, effective policy learning depends on how agents sense, interpret, and process…
Multi-agent systems are being increasingly deployed in challenging environments for performing complex tasks such as multi-target tracking, search-and-rescue, and intrusion detection. Notwithstanding the computational limitations of…
We show that the Wang-Landau algorithm can be formulated as a stochastic gradient descent algorithm minimizing a smooth and convex objective function, of which the gradient is estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo iterations. The…
Subspace learning and matrix factorization problems have great many applications in science and engineering, and efficient algorithms are critical as dataset sizes continue to grow. Many relevant problem formulations are non-convex, and in…
A decomposition-based coverage control scheme is proposed for multi-agent, persistent surveillance missions operating in a communication-constrained, dynamic environment. The proposed approach decouples high-level task assignment from…
This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehicle networks performing distributed sensing tasks where each vehicle plays the role of a mobile tunable sensor. The paper…
Task learning in neural networks typically requires finding a globally optimal minimizer to a loss function objective. Conventional designs of swarm based optimization methods apply a fixed update rule, with possibly an adaptive step-size…
We introduce a new Swarm-Based Gradient Descent (SBGD) method for non-convex optimization. The swarm consists of agents, each is identified with a position, ${\mathbf x}$, and mass, $m$. The key to their dynamics is communication: masses…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…
This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…
In this paper, we propose a new framework to study distributed optimization problems with stochastic gradients by employing a multi-agent system with continuous-time dynamics. Here the goal of the agents is to cooperatively minimize the sum…
The density-distribution method has recently become a promising paradigm owing to its adaptability to variations in swarm size. However, existing studies face practical challenges in achieving complex shape representation and decentralized…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed multi-agent optimization over a network, where each agent possesses a local cost function that is smooth and strongly convex. The global objective is to find a common solution that…
We study multi-agent coverage algorithms for autonomous monitoring and patrol in urban environments. We consider scenarios in which a team of flying agents uses downward facing cameras (or similar sensors) to observe the environment outside…
We propose a distributed control algorithm for a multi-agent network whose agents deploy over a cluttered region in accordance with a time-varying coverage density function while avoiding collisions with all obstacles they encounter. Our…
Multi-agent coverage control is used as a mechanism to influence the behavior of a group of robots by introducing time-varying domain. The coverage optimization problem is modified to adopt time-varying domains, and the proposed control law…