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Chemotaxis-Inspired Control for Multi-Agent Coordination: Formation Control by Two Types of Chemotaxis Controllers

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Abstract

This paper investigates the control of multi-agent systems inspired by chemotaxis of microorganisms. Chemotaxis is a biological phenomenon wherein organisms in an environment are attracted to food but move away from toxins. The problem addressed here is a formation control problem, i.e., a design problem of distributed controllers wherein the relative positions of agents become the desired positions with the progression of time. To solve this problem, we introduce a performance index that quantifies the achieved degree of a desired formation, and decompose it into local indices that can be embedded in the distributed controllers. Based on this, we propose formation controllers inspired by chemotaxis of Escherichia coli (E. coli), where each agent moves with the aim of increasing the corresponding local performance index using the chemotaxis controller of E. coli. In addition, to improve the accuracy of the resulting formation, we present Paramecium caudatum (P. caudatum)-type formation controllers by replacing the chemotaxis controller of E. coli used above with that of P. caudatum. The effectiveness is demonstrated by a comparison with the E. coli-type formation controllers via numerical simulation. This result implies that various chemotaxis controllers can be used in our method and the performance of the resulting controllers can be improved by choosing an appropriate chemotaxis controller.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Okayama Prefectural University, 111 Kuboki, Soja, Okayama, 719-1197, Japan

    Shinsaku Izumi

  2. Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan

    Shun-ichi Azuma

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  1. Shinsaku Izumi
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  2. Shun-ichi Azuma
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Correspondence to Shinsaku Izumi.

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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant numbers 17H03280 and 19K15016.

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Izumi, S., Azuma, Si. Chemotaxis-Inspired Control for Multi-Agent Coordination: Formation Control by Two Types of Chemotaxis Controllers. New Gener. Comput. 38, 303–324 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-020-00093-0

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