978-91-7729-579-2A multi-agent system consists of multiple agents cooperating to achieve a common objective through local interactions. An important problem is how to reduce the amount of information exchanged, since agents in practice only have limited energy and communication resources. In this thesis, we propose dynamic event-triggered control strategies to solve consensus and formation problems for multi-agent systems under such resource constraints. In the first part, we propose dynamic event-triggered control strategies to solve the average consensus problem for first-order continuous-time multi-agent systems. It is proven that the state of each agent converges exponentially to the average of all agents' initial states under the proposed triggering laws if and only if the underlying undirected graph is connected.In the second part, we study the consensus problem with input saturation over directed graphs. It is shown that the underlying directed graph having a directed spanning tree is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving consensus. Moreover, in order to reduce the overall need of communication and system updates, we propose an event-triggered control strategy to solve this problem. It is shown that consensus is achieved, again, if and only if the underlying directed graph has a directed spanning tree.In the third part, dynamic event-triggered formation control with connectivity preservation is investigated. Single and double integrator dynamics are considered. All agents are shown to converge to the formation exponentially with connectivity preservation.The effectiveness of the theoretical results in the thesis is verified by several numerical examples. / <p>QC 20171025</p>

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In recent years, research in the field of automation has been advancing quickly in the direction of wireless networks of sensors and actuators. This development has introduced a need to reduce the amount of communication. A number of different alternative schemes have been proposed. They are usually divided into event-triggered schemes and self-triggered ones. The main purpose of this Master's thesis was to further develop and evaluate the sesampling schemes, focusing on their needed communication. The effect on control performance by the different schemes was also taken into account. Because of the difficulty in performing a theoretical comparison, the thesis focused on evaluating the schemes in simulations and in experiments on real industrial processes. The results indicate that simply using a slower periodic scheme may reduce as much communication without losing much performance as the more flexible schemes. This would imply that investing further into the other schemes may be of waste. However, using an event-triggered scheme with improvements introduced in this report may offer some advantages when it comes to performance and simplicity in setup. Maybe more importantly, it is safer during rapidly changing conditions, which also makes it very unlikely that a slow periodic sampler would ever be implemented on a real system. The results in general are very positive with communication reductions of over 90% when using a well tuned base sampling interval and over 99% when the comparison is made to current implementations in the industry, all without significant loss of performance.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(医学) / 甲第23760号 / 医博第4806号 / 新制||医||1056(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院医学研究科医学専攻 / (主査)教授 平井 豊博, 教授 湊谷 謙司, 教授 森信 暁雄 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Medical Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

Les systèmes multi-agents (MAS) et la commande coopérative ont fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches ces dernières années. Les domaines d'application sont très diverses et dans le cas des systèmes multi-véhicules, des approches ont été développées pour des unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), satellites, avions... Les types de missions envisagées sont des missions complexes telles l’exploration ou la surveillance de zones, la recherche et le suivi de cibles d'intérêt. Cependant, la coopération requière des échanges de communication entre les agents. Lorsque ceux-ci sont nombreux, cet échange peut conduire à des saturations du réseau, à l'augmentation des délais de transmission ou l’occurrence de pertes de paquets, d'où l'intérêt de réduire le nombre de communication. Dans les méthodes event-triggered, une communication est envoyée quand une condition, basée sur des paramètres choisis et un seuil prédéfini, est remplie. La principale difficulté est de définir une condition qui permettra de limiter les échanges sans dégrader l'exécution de la mission choisie. Dans le cas d'un système distribué, chaque agent doit maintenir une estimation de la valeur de l'état des autres agents afin de remplacer l'absence d'informations due à la communication réduite. L'objectif de cette thèse est de développer des lois de commandes et des estimateurs distribuées pour un système multi-agent afin de réduire le nombre de communication par méthode event-triggered, tout en prenant en compte la présence de perturbations. L'étude est divisée en deux grandes parties. La première décrit une méthode de communication event-triggered permettant de converger vers un consensus pour un système multi-agents de modèle d'évolution dynamique linéaire généralisée et en présence de perturbations d'état. Pour réduire les communications, un estimateur précis de l'état des agents est proposé, couplé à un estimateur de l'estimation de l'erreur, ainsi qu'un protocole de communication adapté. En prenant en compte la commande appliquée à chaque agent, l'estimateur proposé permet d'obtenir un consensus avec un nombre bien inférieur de communication que de la méthode de référence dans l'état de l'art. La seconde partie propose une stratégie de réduction de communication pour une commande de vol en formation permettant de suivre une trajectoire de référence. La dynamique des agents est décrite par un système Euler-Lagrange incluant des perturbations et des méconnaissances sur les paramètres du modèle. Différentes structures d'estimateurs sont proposées pour reconstruire les informations manquantes. La condition d'event-triggered distribuée proposée est basée sur l'écart relatif entre les positions et vitesses réelles et désirées des agents, ainsi que l'erreur relative entre la valeur estimée de l'état de l'agent et la valeur réelle. Une trajectoire de référence unique est déterminée pour guider la flotte. L'effet des perturbations sur la formation et la communication a été analysé. Enfin, les méthodes proposées ont été adaptées pour tenir compte des dégradations de performances dues aux pertes de données et aux délais de communication. Pour les deux types d'approches présentées les conditions de la stabilité du MAS ont été obtenues par l'intermédiaire de fonctions de Lyapunov et l'absence de paradoxe de Zeno a été étudiée. / A large amount of research work has been recently dedicated to the study of Multi-Agent System and cooperative control. Applications to mobile robots, like unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), satellites, or aircraft have been tackled to insure complex mission such as exploration or surveillance. However, cooperative tasking requires communication between agents, and for a large number of agents, the number of communication exchanges may lead to network saturation, increased delays or loss of transferred packets, from the interest in reducing them. In event-triggered strategy, a communication is broadcast when a condition, based on chosen parameters and some threshold, is fulfilled. The main difficulty consists in determining the communication triggering condition (CTC) that will ensure the completion of the task assigned to the MAS. In a distributed strategy, each agent maintains an estimate value of others agents state to replace missing information due to limited communication. This thesis focuses on the development of distributed control laws and estimators for multi-agent system to limit the number of communication by using event-triggered strategy in the presence of perturbation with two main topics, i.e. consensus and formation control. The first part addresses the problem of distributed event-triggered communications for consensus of a multi-agent system with both general linear dynamics and state perturbations. To decrease the amount of required communications, an accurate estimator of the agent states is introduced, coupled with an estimator of the estimation error, and adaptation of communication protocol. By taking into account the control input of the agents, the proposed estimator allows to obtain a consensus with fewer communications than those obtained by a reference method. The second part proposes a strategy to reduce the number of communications for displacement-based formation control while following a desired reference trajectory. Agent dynamics are described by Euler-Lagrange models with perturbations and uncertainties on the model parameters. Several estimator structures are proposed to rebuild missing information. The proposed distributed communication triggering condition accounts for inter-agent displacements and the relative discrepancy between actual and estimated agent states. A single a priori trajectory has to be evaluated to follow the desired path. Effect of state perturbations on the formation and on the communications is analyzed. Finally, the proposed methods have been adapted to consider packet dropouts and communication delays. For both types of problems, Lyapunov stability of the MAS has been developed and absence of Zeno behavior is studied.

Student Number : 0105159R - MSc(Eng) Dissertation - School of Electrical and Information Engineering - Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment / This dissertation presents the design of a re-usable rocket for use in triggered-lightning experiments. It is intended that the rocket will tow a thin wire to sufficient height so that the lightning mechanism will attach onto the wire and follow it to ground. The rocket design is inherently safe as it does not use explosive materials for its propulsion system, and hence conforms to South African explosive legislation. The designed rocket consists of a hybrid motor, which uses a solid combustion chamber and liquid oxidiser rather than solid motors which use a single solid fuel or a liquid motor which uses two liquid propellants. The mechanical performance of the oxidiser stage is critical in containing the pressurised oxidiser and regulating the flow of the oxidiser into the combustion chamber. The design of the combustion chamber and the rate at which the solid material burns is key to the generation of the pressure which is expelled through the nozzle to produce thrust. The design of the nozzle is covered in which the material from which it is made must withstand temperatures in excess of 1600 ◦C. The entire system was modelled to calculate the parameters of the various subsystems. The simulation study shows that the rocket will be able to reach 1 km with a complete section of wire towed behind it. A cost analysis, against other commercial rocket systems, was performed. The analysis concludes from the total cost of ownership that it is significantly cheaper to operate the designed rocket, over the course of the experiment, than other rocket systems.

Stimulus-responsive colloidosomes which completely dissolve upon a mild pH change are developed. pH-Responsive nanoparticles that dissolve upon a mild pH increase are synthesized by a nanoprecipitation method and are used as stabilizers for a double water-in-oil-in-water Pickering emulsion. These emulsions serve as templates for the production of pH-responsive colloidosomes. Removal of the middle oil phase produces water-core colloidosomes that have a shell made of pH-responsive nanoparticles, which rapidly dissolve above pH 7. The permeability of these capsules is assessed by FRAP, whereby the diffusion of a fluorescent tracer through the capsule shell is monitored. Three methods for tuning the permeability of the pH-responsive colloidosomes were developed: ethanol consolidation, layer-by-layer assembly and the generation of PLGA-pH-responsive nanoparticle hybrid colloidosomes. The resulting colloidosomes have different responses to the pH stimulus, as well as different pre-release permeability values. Additionally, fundamental studies regarding the role of particle surface roughness on Pickering emulsification are also shown. The pH-responsive nanoparticles were used as a coating for larger silica particles, producing rough raspberry-like particles. Partial dissolution of the nanoparticle coating allows tuning of the substrate surface roughness while retaining the same surface chemistry. The results obtained show that surface roughness increases the emulsion stability of decane-water systems (to almost twice), but only up to a certain point, where extremely rough particles produced less stable emulsions presumably due to a Cassie-Baxter wetting regime. Additionally, in an octanol-water system, surface roughness was shown to affect the type of emulsion generated. These results are of exceptional importance since they are the first controlled experimental evidence regarding the role of particle surface roughness on Pickering emulsification, thus clarifying some conflicting ideas that exist regarding this issue.

This master thesis aimed to create and characterize multilayer coatings upon mesoporous silica particles (MSP). The properties of the coating aimed for, was to have a triggerable controlled release, where a targeted enzyme within the intestine, alpha-amylase, is supposed to degrade the coating. The coating was created from a bilayer consisting of DOTAP and DOPC in a 1:3 molar ratio, which serves as a protective coating. The second layer interacting with the surroundings consisted of a starch component, amylopectin, which is degraded by alpha-amylase. The study of the coating was performed with ellipsometry, where the adsorption of the different layers of the coating on a planar silica surface and the enzyme-triggered degradation was recorded. The adsorbed amount of DOTAP/DOPC was 4,22 ± 0,11 mg/m2 and amylopectin 1,82 ± 0,94. The effects of different pH where performed, simulating the coated particle going through the gastro-intestinal system. Two enzymes alpha-amylase and phospholipase A2 (PLA2) where used for degradation of the coating. The knowledge from ellipsometry was applied to coating mesoporous silica particles and it was confirmed that the two layers had formed with zeta- potential measurement.

Debugging is an important phase in the embedded software development cycle because of its high proportion in the overall cost in the product development. Debugging is difficult for real-time applications as such programs are time-sensitive and must meet deadlines in often a resource constrained environment. A common approach for real-time systems is to monitor the execution instead of stepping through the program, because stepping will usually violate all deadline constraints. We consider a time-triggered approach for program monitoring at runtime, resulting in bounded and predictable overhead. In time-triggered execution monitoring, a monitor runs as a separate process in parallel with an application program and samples the program's state periodically to evaluate a set of properties. Applying this technique in computing systems, results in bounded and predictable overhead. However, the time-triggered approach can have high overhead depending on the granularity of the monitoring effort. To reduce this overhead, we instrument the program with markers that will require to sample less frequently and thus reduce the overhead. This leads to interesting problems of (a) where to place the markers in the code and (b) how to manipulate the markers. While related work investigates the first part, in this work, we investigate the second part. We investigate different instrumentation schemes and propose two new schemes based on bitvectors that significantly reduce the overhead for time-triggered execution monitoring. Time-triggered execution monitoring suffers from several drawbacks such as; the time-triggered monitor requires certain synchronization features at the operating system level and may suffer from various concurrency and synchronization dependencies in a real-time setting. Furthermore, the time-triggered execution monitoring scheme requires the embedded environment to provide multi-tasking features. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a new method called time-triggered self-monitoring, where the program under inspection is instrumented, so that it self-samples its state in a periodic fashion without requiring assistance from an external monitor or an internal timer. The experimental results show that a time-triggered self-monitored program performs significantly better in terms of execution time, binary code size, and context switches when compared to the same program monitored by an external time-triggered monitor.

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