During the last decades, considerable progress has been observed in all aspects regarding the study of cooperative systems including modeling of cooperative systems, resource allocation, discrete event driven dynamical control, continuous and hybrid dynamical control, and theory of the interaction of information, control, and hierarchy. Solution methods have been proposed using control and optimization approaches, emergent rule based techniques, game theoretic and team theoretic approaches. Measures of performance have been suggested that include the effects of hierarchies and information structures on solutions, performance bounds, concepts of convergence and stability, and problem complexity. These and other topics were discusses at the Second Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. Refereed papers written by selected conference participants from the conference are gathered in this volume, which presents problem models, theoretical results, and algorithms for various aspects of cooperative control. Audience: The book is addressed to faculty, graduate students, and researchers in optimization and control, computer sciences and engineering.

Cooperative, collaborating autonomous systems are at the forefront of research efforts in numerous disciplines across the applied sciences. There is constant progress in solution techniques for these systems. However, despite this progress, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve. Theoretical results are very difficult to come by. Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new, cutting-edge, ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, information flow, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 30 – February 1, 2008.

Across the globe, the past several years have seen a tremendous increase in the role of cooperative autonomous systems. The field of cooperative control and optimization has established itself as a part of many different scientific disciplines. The contents of this hugely important volume, which adds much to the debate on the subject, are culled from papers presented at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, in January 2007.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must! The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi neering.

A comprehensive review of the state of the art in the control of multi-agent systems theory and applications The superiority of multi-agent systems over single agents for the control of unmanned air, water and ground vehicles has been clearly demonstrated in a wide range of application areas. Their large-scale spatial distribution, robustness, high scalability and low cost enable multi-agent systems to achieve tasks that could not successfully be performed by even the most sophisticated single agent systems. Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications provides a wide-ranging review of the latest developments in the cooperative control of multi-agent systems theory and applications. The applications described are mainly in the areas of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Throughout, the authors link basic theory to multi-agent cooperative control practice — illustrated within the context of highly-realistic scenarios of high-level missions — without losing site of the mathematical background needed to provide performance guarantees under general working conditions. Many of the problems and solutions considered involve combinations of both types of vehicles. Topics explored include target assignment, target tracking, consensus, stochastic game theory-based framework, event-triggered control, topology design and identification, coordination under uncertainty and coverage control. Establishes a bridge between fundamental cooperative control theory and specific problems of interest in a wide range of applications areas Includes example applications from the fields of space exploration, radiation shielding, site clearance, tracking/classification, surveillance, search-and-rescue and more Features detailed presentations of specific algorithms and application frameworks with relevant commercial and military applications Provides a comprehensive look at the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, while offering informed speculation on future directions for collective control systems The use of multi-agent system technologies in both everyday commercial use and national defense is certain to increase tremendously in the years ahead, making this book a valuable resource for researchers, engineers, and applied mathematicians working in systems and controls, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in those areas.

Assuming only neighbor-neighbor interaction among vehicles, this monograph develops distributed consensus strategies that ensure that the information states of all vehicles in a network converge to a common value. Readers learn to deal with groups of autonomous vehicles in aerial, terrestrial, and submarine environments. Plus, they get the tools needed to overcome impaired communication by using constantly updated neighbor-neighbor interchange.

The paradigm of ‘multi-agent’ cooperative control is the challenge frontier for new control system application domains, and as a research area it has experienced a considerable increase in activity in recent years. This volume, the result of a UCLA collaborative project with Caltech, Cornell and MIT, presents cutting edge results in terms of the “dimensions” of cooperative control from leading researchers worldwide. This dimensional decomposition allows the reader to assess the multi-faceted landscape of cooperative control. Cooperative Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems is organized into four main themes, or dimensions, of cooperative control: distributed control and computation, adversarial interactions, uncertain evolution and complexity management. The military application of autonomous vehicles systems or multiple unmanned vehicles is primarily targeted; however much of the material is relevant to a broader range of multi-agent systems including cooperative robotics, distributed computing, sensor networks and data network congestion control. Cooperative Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems offers the reader an organized presentation of a variety of recent research advances, supporting software and experimental data on the resolution of the cooperative control problem. It will appeal to senior academics, researchers and graduate students as well as engineers working in the areas of cooperative systems, control and optimization.