Matthew T. Hale

Sebastian F. Ruf, Matthew T. Hale, Talha Manzoor et al.

In this paper, we study the global stability properties of a multi-agent model of natural resource consumption that balances ecological and social network components in determining the consumption behavior of a group of agents. The social network is assumed to be leaderless, a condition that ensures that no single node has a greater influence than any other node on the dynamics of the resource consumption. It is shown that any network structure can be made leaderless by the social preferences of the agents. The ecological network component includes a quantification of each agent's environmental concern, which captures each individual agent's threshold for when a resource becomes scarce. We show that leaderlessness and a mild bound on agents' environmental concern are jointly sufficient for global asymptotic stability of the consumption network to a positive consumption value, indicating that appropriately configured networks can continuously consume a resource without driving its value to zero. The behavior of these leaderless resource consumption networks is verified in simulation.

Zhe Xu, Kasra Yazdani, Matthew T. Hale et al.

Privacy is an important concern in various multiagent systems in which data collected from the agents are sensitive. We propose a differentially private controller synthesis approach for multi-agent systems subject to high-level specifications expressed in metric temporal logic (MTL). We consider a setting where each agent sends data to a cloud (computing station) through a set of local hubs and the cloud is responsible for computing the control inputs of the agents. Specifically, each agent adds privacy noise (e.g., Gaussian noise) point-wise in time to its own outputs before sharing them with a local hub. Each local hub runs a Kalman filter to estimate the state of the corresponding agent and periodically sends such state estimates to the cloud. The cloud computes the optimal inputs for each agent subject to an MTL specification. While guaranteeing differential privacy of each agent, the controller is also synthesized to ensure a probabilistic guarantee for satisfying the MTL specification.We provide an implementation of the proposed method on a simulation case study with two Baxter-On-Wheels robots as the agents.