Fault-Resilient Continuum Deformation Coordination

This article offers a physics-based automation with two operation modes: 1) homogeneous deformation mode (HDM) and 2) containment exclusion mode (CEM), to safely plan a large-scale group coordination and resiliently recover safety in the presence of unpredicted agent failures. HDM becomes active when all agents are healthy, where the group coordination is defined by homogeneous transformation coordination functions. At HDM, a desired n-D homogeneous transformation (n = 2, 3) is uniquely related to the desired trajectories of n + 1 leaders and acquired by the remaining followers in real-time through local communication. At CEM, agent coordination is treated as an ideal fluid flow, where the desired agents' paths are defined along stream lines inspired by fluid flow field theory to circumvent exclusion spaces surrounding failed agent(s). This article formally specifies the transitions between the HDM and CEM by using local proximity and applying the continuum deformation properties. More specifically, local proximity is used by agents to define interagent communication in an unsupervised fashion once they recover safety and HDM is activated. On the other hand, properties of homogeneous transformation are applied to quickly detect each arising anomalous situation and exclude failed agent(s) from group coordination of healthy agents.