The main goal of this paper is to design a team of agents that can accomplish multi-target pursuit formation using a developed leader-follower strategy. It is supposed that every target can accept a certain number of agents. First, each agent can automatically choose its target based on the distance from the agent to the target and the number of agents accepted by the target. In view of the fact that all agents are randomly dispersed in the workplace at the initial time, we present a numbering strategy for them. During the movement of agents, not every agent can always obtain pertinent state information about the targets. So, a developed leader-follower strategy and a pursuit formation algorithm are proposed. Under the proposed method, agents with the same target can maintain a circle formation. Furthermore, it turns out that the pursuit formation algorithm for agents to the desired formation is convergent. Simulation studies are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
In many wireless sensor network applications, it should be considered that how to trade off the inherent conflict between energy efficient communication and desired quality of service such as real-time and reliability of transportation. In this paper, a novel routing protocols named balance energy-efficient and real-time with reliable communication (BERR) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are proposed, which considers the joint performances of real-time, energy efficiency and reliability. In BERR, a node, which is preparing to transmit data packets to sink node, estimates the energy cost, hop count value to sink node and reliability using local information gained from neighbor nodes. BERR considers not only each sender' energy level but also that of its neighbor nodes, so that the better energy conditions a node has, the more probability it will be to be chosen as the next relay node. To enhance real-time delivery, it will choose the node with smaller hop count value to sink node as the possible relay candidate. To improve reliability, it adopts retransmission mechanism. Simulation results show that BERR has better performances in term of energy consumption, network lifetime, reliability and small transmitting delay.
This paper presents a symmetric cooperation strategy for cooperative relay networks with multiple users. The multi-user symmetric cooperation model and the relay selection algorithm are proposed. Then, the time slot allocation problem is cast into a bargaining problem, and the optimal time slot allocation solution is obtained by Nash bargaining solution (NBS). Moreover, we also consider the implementations of the cooperation strategy, i.e., the grouping and admission control algorithm. Simulation results show that users can obtain larger rates under the symmetric cooperation strategy than the non-cooperative case.
This paper deals with the consensus problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Different from most existing consensus protocols, we consider the consensus seeking of two types of agents, namely, active agents and passive agents. The objective is to directly control the active agents such that the states of all the agents would achieve consensus. In order to obtain a computational approach, we subtly introduce an appropriate Markov chain to cast the heterogeneous systems into a unified framework. Such a framework is helpful for tackling the constraints from passive agents. Furthermore, a sufficient and necessary condition is established to guarantee the consensus in heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.
This paper is concerned with the cooperative target pursuit problem by multiple agents based on directed acyclic graph. The target appears at a random location and moves only when sensed by the agents, and agents will pursue the target once they detect its existence. Since the ability of each agent may be different, we consider the heterogeneous multi-agent systems. According to the topology of the multi-agent systems, a novel consensus-based control law is proposed, where the target and agents are modeled as a leader and followers, respectively. Based on Mason's rule and signal flow graph analysis, the convergence conditions are provided to show that the agents can catch the target in a finite time. Finally, simulation studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.