When developing concurrent software, a proper engineering practice is to choose a good level of abstraction for expressing concurrency control. Ideally, this level should provide platform-independent abstractions but, as the platform concurrency behaviour cannot be ignored, this abstraction level must also be able to cope with it and exhibit the influence of different possible behaviours. We st...

A field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based model predictive controller (MPC) for two phases of spacecraft rendezvous is presented. Linear time varying prediction models are used to accommodate elliptical orbits, and a variable prediction horizon is used to facilitate finite time completion of the longerrange manœuvres, whilst a fixed and receding prediction horizon is used for fine-grained tr...

Two mobile agents (robots), starting from different nodes of an n-node network at possibly different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as rendezvous. Agents move in synchronous rounds using a deterministic algorithm. In each round, an agent decides to either remain idle or to move to one of the adjacent nodes. Each agent has a distinct integer label from the set {1, . ...

This paper addresses a multi-robot optimal assembly planning problem which in essence is an augmented Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP+). In our TSP+, both the “salesperson” (a robot with a tool) as well as the “cities” (another robot with a workpiece) move. Namely, in addition to the sequencing of tasks, further planning is required to choose where the “salesperson” should rendezvous with e...

A set of mobile robots is placed at points of an infinite line. The robots are equipped with GPS devices and they may communicate their positions on the line to a central authority. The collection contains an unknown subset of “spies”, i.e., byzantine robots, which are indistinguishable from the non-faulty ones. The set of the non-faulty robots need to rendezvous in the shortest possible time i...

Establishing an energy efficient wireless sensor network is a challenging task. A significant amount of research work has already been carried out in this direction to study energy optimization in WSN by taking the advantage of mobile sink or mobile agents. Many approaches using mobile sink have demonstrated that energy usage can be optimized significantly in the phenomenon area from where the ...

Rendezvous and docking operations of unmanned supply vehicles, e.g. presently Progress within the Russian Mir Space Station scenario, and later within the International Space Station scenario the Russian Progress, the European ATV and the Japanese HTV, are automatic but not fully autonomous. Safety of crew, vehicle security of the target station and mission success assurance require monitoring ...

In the presence of failure, any protocol for distributed atomic commitment necessarily has a ‘window of vulnerability’ where the crash of one party makes other parties block. This vulnerability turns out not so serious in one special case – that of synchronous rendezvous. Rendezvous is important because it is the basis for process calculi, which themselves underpin several new experimental lang...

We consider a new type of asymmetric rendezvous search problem in which Agent II needs to give Agent I a ‘gift’ which can be in the form of information or material. The gift can either be transfered upon meeting, as in traditional rendezvous, or it can be dropped off by II at a location he passes, in the hope it will be found by I. The gift might be a water bottle for a traveller lost in the de...

Spacecraft relative state estimation is of paramount importance in the problem rendezvous with an uncooperative target; indeed, accurate prediction its position and attitude cr...