Project Details
Description
Abstract
Coordinated control of multiple robotic platforms, multi-vehicles, or groups of mobile agents is a
rich and fascinating research field and has great commercial and military impact. This project
seeks to achieve coordinated, goal oriented task level control with robustness, failure-tolerance,
and distributed implementation. The PI proposes 1) a probabilistic approach to address the
robustness issue of the coordinated control subject to parametric uncertainty, dynamically
changing operating conditions, and the change of neighboring interaction between mobile agents,
and 2) a quorum-system based architecture that defines the neighboring interaction, information
flow and communication configuration of a group of mobile agents.
The probabilistic approach has a better modeling of the real world with less conservativeness; it
provides reduced control complexity and enhanced performance and efficient use of control
effort. The proposed feedback control is built on a new architecture that targets distributed
implementation and failure-tolerance under the constraints of limited communication bandwidth.
The proposed paradigm for coordinated control of groups of mobile autonomous agents will
provide a high degree of autonomy for distributed execution of elemental, high bandwidth tasks,
allowing the operator to interact with the system of platforms at a high level. The intellectual
merit lies in the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which will hopefully foster new
paradigms for coordinated control of groups of mobile agents, and spawn new topics for further
research.
The educational plan includes a strengthening and integration of interdisciplinary research topics
of robust control and distributed algorithms in a graduate level control course. To assess the
effectiveness of the proposed educational activities, the PI plans to collaborate with colleagues at
the Penn State's Leonard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The PI herself
is a female member of the faculty; she will continue to work with the Women in Engineering
Program (WEP) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Penn State to recruit women and
minorities for graduate study, and to encourage them to pursue academic careers after
graduation.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 8/1/04 → 7/31/08 |
Funding
- National Science Foundation: $210,000.00