• Dr. Geir Dullerud
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • 113 McBryde Hall
  • 4:00 p.m.
  • Faculty Host: Dr. Mazen Farhood

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.