Synchronization of Geophysically Driven Oscillators with Short-Range Interaction

This article presents a method to synchronize a network of spatially distributed nonlinear oscillators that can only interact with each other intermittently and at very close range. This problem arises in applications where semipassive sensors drift along patterns of ambient geophysical flows that bring them close periodically and have to establish periodic rendezvous in order to efficiently exchange information or be retrieved. The problem is challenging because cooperative control action can only be applied over the short time window that agents are in rendezvous, and different subgroups that share some members meet asynchronously at different locations. In such cases, the ambient geophysical dynamics that drive the motion of the agents need to be directly incorporated into control design. This article presents a decentralized, intermittently activated, pairwise interacting control law for the agents, which, under certain conditions on overall network connectivity, brings the whole system into a steady state, where all agents synchronize their periodic rendezvous around configurations determined by the surrounding geophysical field.