Control of formation shape in multiagent systems
Brian D O Anderson (The Australian National University)
SYSTEMS AND CONTROL SERIESDATE: 2011-08-12
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
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ABSTRACT:
Formations of robots, underwater vehicles and autonomous airborne vehicles are progressively being deployed to tackle problems of surveillance, bush fire control, and the like. Much formation behaviour mimics the behaviour of formations of living organisms, such as birds and fish.
Applications requirements generally impose some sort of constraints on the formation shape; it may have to be precisely controlled as if it were rigid, or there may be looser constraints. The presentation will consider the types of control, communications and sensing architecture that allow scalability for formations with many individual agents, and allow preservation of the formation shape, as well as its motion as a cohesive whole. The scalability requirement imposes a need for significant decentralization of information and control structures, and, just as in a formation of birds or fish, no one bird or fish can be expected to sense all other birds or fish and compute its own trajectory using even partial knowledge of the trajectories of all other individual birds or fish, so the amount of sensing, communication and control computation by any one agent has to be limited.
BIO:
Brian Anderson is Distinguished Professor at ANU and Distinguished Researcher in NICTA. His research interests are currently in formation control, sensor networks and econometric modelling. His past contributions have been in other areas of control as well as circuit theory, signal processing and telecommunications. He was born in Sydney, and received his undergraduate education at the University of Sydney, with majors in pure mathematics and electrical engineering. He subsequently obtained a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Following completion of his education, he worked in industry in Silicon Valley and served as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle from 1967 until 1981. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, IFAC, Royal Society London, Australian Academy of Science, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, and Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales and Newcastle in Australia. He served as President of the International Federation of Automatic Control from 1990 to 1993 and as President of the Australian Academy of Science between 1998 and 2002. His awards include the IEEE Control Systems Award of 1997, the 2001 IEEE James H Mulligan Jr Education Medal, and the Guillemin-Cauer Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 1992 and 2001, the Bode Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1992, the Senior Prize of the IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in 1986, and other best paper awards.
