Coordination with binary controllers: Formation control and disturbance rejection

Distributed formation keeping control is a motion coordination problem which aims at achieving a desired geometrical shape for the positions of a group of agents (e.g. robots). In problems of formation control, an important component is the flow of information among the agents. Although the usual assumption in the literature is the exchange of perfect information among the agents, the latter might be a restrictive requirement due to real-world constraints. To cope with this restriction, quantized information and control have been proposed and studied in the literature. In particular, there has been a growing interest in binary quantizers and controllers owing to the recent developments in cyber-physical systems.
This thesis is mainly focused on the problem of distributed position-based formation keeping of a group of continuous-time dynamic agents using binary controllers. The binary information and control models a sensing scenario in which each agent detects whether or not the components of its current distance vector from a neighbor are above or below the prescribed distance and applies a force (in which each component takes a binary value) to reduce or increase the actual distance. In this context, we consider different classes of dynamical agents, including strict output passive systems, unicycles, and nonholonomic wheeled carts. For the control design and analysis, we use tools from discontinuous dynamical systems, passivity, hybrid dynamical systems, graph theory and internal-model-based approach.