Distributed and Time-Delayed -Winner-Take-All Network for Competitive Coordination of Multiple Robots
研究了一种分布式且考虑时间延迟的k胜者全取网络，用于多机器人系统的竞争协调任务分配，理论推导了最大允许时延并证明了网络的收敛性和鲁棒性。
In this article, a distributed and time-delayed k-winner-take-all (DT-kWTA) network is established and analyzed for competitively coordinated task assignment of a multirobot system. It is considered and designed from the following three aspects. First, a network is built based on a k-winner-take-all (kWTA) competitive algorithm that selects k maximum values from the inputs. Second, a distributed control strategy is used to improve the network in terms of communication load and computational burden. Third, the time-delayed problem prevalent in arbitrary causal systems (especially, in networks) is taken into account in the proposed network. This work combines distributed kWTA competition network with time delay for the first time, thus enabling it to better handle realistic applications than previous work. In addition, it theoretically derives the maximum delay allowed by the network and proves the convergence and robustness of the network. The results are applied to a multirobot system to conduct its robots' competitive coordination to complete the given task.