Title: Cooperative Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems
Speaker: Richard Murray
Speaker Info: Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology
Brief Description:
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Abstract:
Increases in fast and inexpensive wireless communications have enabled a new generation of robotic applications in which a collection of vehicles perform a cooperative task in dynamic, uncertain, and even adversarial environments. While conventional control theory is well suited to design control laws for the individual vehicles, the tools for designing the interconnected control laws required for the complex tasks required in applications is considerably less well developed. In this talk I will describe three sets of results that make inroads into this class of problems: formation stability using graph Laplacians, distributed optimization for cooperative control, and distributed estimation across networks. These results are being tested on a new experimental platform being jointly developed at Cornell and Caltech that allows two teams of 6-10 robots each and up to two human operators to compete in a game of capture the flag.Date: Friday, February 18, 2005