As distributed systems are getting more and more complex, search facilities for finding services and data within the system become crucial. Users expect search engines to deal with complex query languages like keyword search, SQL, or XPath. At the same time, application developers cannot be expected to come up with distributed versions of those query languages from scratch. Rendezvous search sy...

T HIS Note reports results from a study carried out for the ESA with the objective of improving the safety of future autonomous rendezvous guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems during the terminal rendezvous mission phase, recognized as a key capability for Mars sample return (MSR). The robustness of the critical terminal phase of the mission must be rigorously investigated under diff...

We consider a new type of asymmetric rendezvous search problem in which player II needs to give I ‘gift’ can be the form information or material. The gift either transfered upon meeting, as traditional rendezvous, it dropped off by at location he passes, hope will found I. might water bottle for traveller lost desert; supply cache Captain Scott Antarctic; important (left gift). common aim two p...

Two mobile agents, starting at arbitrary, possibly different times from arbitrary nodes of an unknown network, have to meet at some node. Agents move in synchronous rounds: in each round an agent can either stay at the current node or move to one of its neighbors. Agents have different labels which are positive integers. Each agent knows its own label, but not the label of the other agent. In t...

Sensor networks are large-scale, self-organizing, distributed networks of small sensing devices embedded in the physical world. Due to the limited resources of the devices and the uncertainty of the environment, efficient and robust data-access mechanisms are both essential and challenging. Rendezvous-based data-access mechanisms provide an efficient and valuable solution for provisioning a wid...

Formation flying of spacecraft and autonomous rendezvous and docking of spacecraft are two missions in which satellites operate in close proximity and their relative trajectories are critically important. Both classes of missions rely on accurate dynamics models for fuel minimization and observance of strict constraints for preventing collisions and achieving mission objectives. This thesis pre...

A rendezvous problem for a team of autonomous vehicles that is communicating through quantized channels is considered. Communication topologies and feedback control law are presented that solves the rendezvous problem in the sense that a meeting point for the vehicles is practically stabilized. In particular, it is shown that uniform quantizers can sometimes be replaced by logarithmic quantizer...