October 05, 2012, Webb 1100

Many mechanical systems including autonomous vehicles, robotic manipulators, and walking robots are Lagrangian systems. In this talk, we focus on distributed coordination of multiple fully-actuated Lagrangian systems in the presence of only local interaction. We first introduce distributed coordinated tracking algorithms in the presence of a dynamic leader for networked Lagrangian systems under the constraints that the leader is a neighbor of only a subset of the followers and the followers have only local interaction. We then introduce distributed containment control algorithms with stationary or dynamic leaders under a directed network topology. As a special case, distributed leadless synchronization will also be discussed. Simulation results will be presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Wei Ren received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Hohai University, China, in 1997, the M.S. degree in mechatronics from Tongji University, China, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2004. From October 2004 to July 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He was an assistant professor (August 2005 to June 2010) and an associate professor (July 2010 to June 2011) with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-ing, Utah State University, Logan. Since July 2011, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research focuses on distributed control of multi-agent systems and networked control systems. He is an author of two books Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks (Springer-Verlag, 2011) and Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control
(Springer-Verlag, 2008). Dr. Ren was the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for Automatica and Systems and Control Letters and an Associate Editor on the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board.