Probabilistic robust coordinated control of quorum systems of mobile autonomous agents

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AbstractCoordinated control of multiple robotic platforms, multi-vehicles, or groups of mobile agents is arich and fascinating research field and has great commercial and military impact. This projectseeks to achieve coordinated, goal oriented task level control with robustness, failure-tolerance,and distributed implementation. The PI proposes 1) a probabilistic approach to address therobustness issue of the coordinated control subject to parametric uncertainty, dynamicallychanging operating conditions, and the change of neighboring interaction between mobile agents,and 2) a quorum-system based architecture that defines the neighboring interaction, informationflow and communication configuration of a group of mobile agents.The probabilistic approach has a better modeling of the real world with less conservativeness; itprovides reduced control complexity and enhanced performance and efficient use of controleffort. The proposed feedback control is built on a new architecture that targets distributedimplementation and failure-tolerance under the constraints of limited communication bandwidth.The proposed paradigm for coordinated control of groups of mobile autonomous agents willprovide 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 intellectualmerit lies in the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which will hopefully foster newparadigms for coordinated control of groups of mobile agents, and spawn new topics for furtherresearch.The educational plan includes a strengthening and integration of interdisciplinary research topicsof robust control and distributed algorithms in a graduate level control course. To assess theeffectiveness of the proposed educational activities, the PI plans to collaborate with colleagues atthe Penn State's Leonard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The PI herselfis a female member of the faculty; she will continue to work with the Women in EngineeringProgram (WEP) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Penn State to recruit women andminorities for graduate study, and to encourage them to pursue academic careers aftergraduation.