Andre R. Fioravanti

Andre R. Fioravanti, Jakub Marecek, Robert N. Shorten et al.

Across smart-grid and smart-city application domains, there are many problems where an ensemble of agents is to be controlled such that both the aggregate behaviour and individual-level perception of the system's performance are acceptable. In many applications, traditional PI control is used to regulate aggregate ensemble performance. Our principal contribution in this note is to demonstrate that PI control may not be always suitable for this purpose, and in some situations may lead to a loss of ergodicity for closed-loop systems. Building on this observation, a theoretical framework is proposed to both analyse and design control systems for the regulation of large scale ensembles of agents with a probabilistic intent. Examples are given to illustrate our results.

Pedro G. Artaxo, Auguste Bourgois, Hugo Sardinha et al.

This work investigates two approaches for the design of autonomous cooperative flight controllers for airship swarms. The first controller is based on formation flight and the second one is based on swarm intelligence strategies. In both cases, the team of airships needs to perform two different tasks: waypoint path following and ground moving target tracking. The UAV platform considered in this work is the NOAMAY airship developed in Brazil. We use a simulated environment to test the proposed approaches. Results show the inherent flexibility of the swarm intelligence approach on both tasks.