PLENARY SESSION
| A VIEW OF COOPERATIVE CONTROL FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES AND SENSOR NETWORKS | |
| Speaker: Christos G. Cassandras | |
| Wednesday, June 29, 2005 | |
| ABSTRACT: Cooperative control refers to the coordination of multiple controllable agents that share a common objective. The agents may be autonomous vehicles that cooperate in performing a particular mission or networked sensing devices that collect and process data which may in turn be used for decision-making purposes. The advent of sensor networks is particularly exciting because it promises to realize a convergence of communication, computing, and control capabilities within a single integrated system. This presentation will first take a view of cooperative control applied to a team of autonomous vehicles in a space with "target points" having associated "rewards" collected when these points are visited. A "mission" is the process of controlling the movement of the vehicles to identify and ultimately visit target points so as to maximize the total collected reward. We will show how to formulate and solve a receding horizon control problem that bypasses the combinatorial and stochastic complexity of assigning vehicles to target points in an uncertain environment. We will also describe some recent efforts to apply a distributed control version of this approach to a laboratory setting involving small autonomous robots with wireless communication capabilities. Adding sensing capabilities to such autonomous vehicles gives rise to an additional problem of exploring a mission space in order to cooperatively discover target points. We will discuss a distributed control approach aimed at maximizing the joint detection probabilities of random target points and illustrate its operation through a software demonstration. | |
| About the Speaker: | |
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| Christos G. Cassandras is Professor of Manufacturing Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He received degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 200 refereed papers in these areas, and two textbooks. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. Dr. Cassandras is currently Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and has served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is a member of the IEEE CSS Board of Governors, chaired the CSS Technical Committee on Control Theory, and served as Chair of several conferences. He has been a plenary speaker at various international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, and a 1991 Lilly Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE. |