.................................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................

One of the main motivating forces behind the rapidly emerging theory of decentralized, cooperative control is the idea that we can deploy large collections of agents over wide spatial domains to solve otherwise intractable surveillance and monitoring problems. However, it is inevitable that in such networks, the performance will deteriorate over time as resources, such as battery power, are dep...

xvii Deutsche Kurzfassung (German Abstract) xix

The paper overviews recent and ongoing efforts by the authors to develop a design methodology to stabilize isolated relative equilibria in a kinematic model of identical particles moving in the plane at unit speed. Isolated relative equi-libria correspond to either parallel motion of all particles with fixed relative spacing or to circular motion of all particles about the same center with fixe...

This paper is directed towards developing Human-Machine Cooperative Systems (HCMS) for augmented surgical manipulation tasks. These tasks are commonly repetitive, sequential, and consist of simple steps. The transitions between these steps can be driven either by the surgeon’s input or sensory information. Consequently, complex tasks can be effectively modeled using a set of basic primitives, w...

We demonstrate the advantages of a distributed collaborative system JOT CSCWj and highlight the requirements of brokercd support faT such a system. We also demonstrate how we have augmented the infrastructure of a prototype CSCW environment called SHASTRA to accommodate brokered collaboration. Several applications and possible scenarios of CSCW with brokered cooperative system are also presente...