In this paper we consider the problem of designing a distributed control strategy such that a linear combination of the states of a number of vehicles coincide at a given time. The vehicles are described by linear difference equations and are subject to convex input constraints. It is demonstrated how primal decomposition techniques and incremental subgradient methods allow us to find a solutio...

We propose three new algorithms for the distributed averaging and consensus problems: two for the fixed-graph case, and one for the dynamic-topology case. The convergence times of our fixed-graph algorithms compare favorably with other known methods, while our algorithm for the dynamic-topology case is the first to be accompanied by a polynomial-time bound on the worst-case convergence time. Th...

We present a new abstraction to replace the t of n assumption used in designing fault-tolerant algorithms. This abstraction models dependent process failures yet it is asion models dependent process failures yet it is as simple to use as the t of n assumption. To illustrate this abstraction, we consider Consensus for synchronous systems with both crash and arbitrary process failures. By conside...

This paper uses recently established properties of compositions of directed graphs together with results from the theory of non-homogeneous Markov chains to derive worst case convergence rates for the headings of a group of mobile autonomous agents which arise in connection with the widely studied Vicsek consensus problem. The paper also uses graph theoretic constructions to solve modified vers...

This paper addresses the problem of coordinating multiple spacecraft to fly in tightly controlled formations. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce a coordination architecture that subsumes leader-following, behavioral, and virtual-structure approaches to the multiagent coordination problem. The architecture is illustrated through a detailed application of the ideas to the problem ...

A method called σ-consensus is proposed to eliminate the need for a user-defined inlier-outlier threshold in RANSAC. Instead of estimating σ, it is marginalized over a range of noise scales using a Bayesian estimator, i.e. the optimized model is obtained as the weighted average using the posterior probabilities as weights. Applying σ-consensus, two methods are proposed: (i) a postprocessing ste...

In the consensus model of Sznajd, opinions are integers and a randomly chosen pair of neighbouring agents with the same opinion forces all their neighbours to share that opinion. We propose a simple extension of the model to continuous opinions, based on the criterion of bounded confidence which is at the basis of other popular consensus models. Here the opinion s is a real number between 0 and...