This seminar finds its basis in mathematically grounded questions about collaboration and control in multi-agent dynamical systems. It is inspired from a practical perspective by recent advances in sensing, computing and networking hardware that make reconfigurable multi-agent systems both technologically and economically feasible on a widespread scale. Examples of such systems include satellite formations, consumer robotics, and more generally networked subsystems of mobile sensors and actuators that cooperate to achieve some aggregate functionality. There are many shared design challenges associated with these types of systems, and the talk will focus on two specific issues: (1) switched hybrid dynamics; and (2) network latency and multi-resolution sensing for control. The technical setting for the talk is the framework of convex optimization, and the results presented lead directly to implementable analysis and design algorithms via semidefinite programming. In part of the work presented on switched dynamics, we will as a special case provide an exact solution to a long-studied receding horizon problem, the first exact solution to this problem to our knowledge. A portion of the presentation will be devoted to describing the experimental multi-vehicle testbed, HoTGames, which consists of wirelessly linked miniature hovercraft, quad-rotor helicopters and wheeled vehicles all capable of onboard multi-modal sensing, and interaction with the Internet and a vision-based sensor network.
Geir E. Dullerud is Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he is also a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, where he is Director of the Decision and Control Laboratory. Prior to this he was on faculty in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo 1996-1998, after being a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1994-1995, in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. During the academic year 2005-2006 he held a visiting faculty position at Stanford University in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has published two books: "A Course in Robust Control Theory", Texts in Applied Mathematics, Springer, 2000, and "Control of Uncertain Sampled-data Systems", Birkhauser 1996. His areas of current research interest include networked and cooperative control, robotic vehicles, complex and hybrid dynamical systems. In 1999 he received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and in 2005 the Xerox Faculty Research Award at UIUC. He is a Fellow of both IEEE and ASME.
