Distributed Control and Estimation of Robotic Vehicle Networks: An Overview of Part 2

The topic of distributed control and estimation (DCE) is of increasing relevance to robotic vehicle systems that share a fundamental need to accomplish multiple tasks across space and time that are beyond the capabilities of a single platform. The growing demand for autonomous mobile multirobot networks has stimulated broad interest in DCE strategies that naturally support cooperative, collaborative, and coordinated vehicle autonomy. When designed and implemented properly, the performance of distributed approaches can approach that of centralized methods, but they also provide better scalability, naturally parallelized computation, and resilience to communication loss and hardware failures.