1. Coordination Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in decentralized control of multi-agent systems (MASs). Decentralized control is characterized by local interactions among agents where each agent exchanges information only with its neighbors. Based on these local interactions, a desired collective behavior of MASs is achieved. Examples are formation control, flocking, consensus control, etc. When compared with centralized control, decentralized control avoids a single point of failure which in turn increases the robustness of MASs, allows for inexpensive and simple agents, and lowers the implementation cost. In addition, decentralized control scales better as the number of agents increases and is sometimes an intrinsic property of MASs. For instance, in industrial applications, we are facing coordination and cooperation of a number of small, inexpensive autonomous systems which replace complex large-scale integration devices. In natural exploration, disaster prevention and handling (firefighting, earthquake, mine clearance etc.) as well as in the service sector (healthcare of senior citizens), autonomous robots, as parts of distributed networks, can help in many ways, and even replace a human in complicated, dangerous and repetitive tasks.

Funding: Croatian government and the Chinese government

Year: 2013-2015

Principal investigators: Stjepan Bogdan, Ji Feng Zhang

2. Networked autonomous system coordination, control and application

Croatian-Chinese Scientific and Technological Cooperation

Finance: Croatian government and the Chinese government

Year: 2009-2011

Principal investigator:  Stjepan Bogdan