A grammatical approach to cooperative control

Abstract

In many cooperative control methods, the geometric state of the system is abstracted to the underlying graph or network topology. In this paper we present a grammatical approach to modeling and controlling the network topology of cooperative systems based on graph rewriting. By restricting rewrites to small subgraphs, graph grammars provide a useful method for programming the concurrent behavior of large decentralized systems of robots. We illustrate the modeling process through an ongoing example and demonstrate mathematical tools for reasoning about the system's behavior. Finally, we briefly describe methods to design continuous controllers that augment the grammar so that geometric requirements may also be satisfied. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.