Bio-inspired cooperative control using a nonlinear oscillator without direct communication among agents

This study presents a bio-inspired decentralized controller for multi-agent systems to track a target value and satisfy the following: (1) the controller requires no communication between agents; (2) the control inputs of the agents are alternately set to zero in response to the changes in the environment; and (3) the number of agents can be changed during tasks. To fulfill these requirements, the decentralized controller uses only the target error measured locally or broadcasted. The proposed controller is a nonlinear oscillator that plays the role of switching the binary input. This is inspired from the mechanism of the interlimb coordination in the locomotion of quadrupeds. We first verify the proposed controller by applying the speed control experiment of a three-motor system. We then validate the controller in a numerical experiment to control the velocity of a rigid object with a variable massive number of agents (maximum: 100 agents). These experiments confirm that the proposed controller works even when the environment is changed (e.g., existence of an unknown disturbance and increasing or decreasing of the number of agents) and automatically achieved while some agents stopped alternately.