Collaborative Research: New Communication Infrastructures For Networked Coordinated Control

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The focus of this project is integrated design and analysis of communication networks in service of coordinated control of multi-vehicle systems. Consider a set of vehicles, equipped with local controllers and wireless radios, that is set to arrange itself, to stabilize, and to control its collective motion. To achieve globally desirable formation behavior, the controller on a given vehicle must respond to the motion and state of others.In fact, there exists a complicated coupling among system components: network architecture, communications protocols, and controller design. The integrated design of these components is the objective of this project. The fundamental challenge in designing networked control systems is that the tasks of communication and control, in general, cannot be considered decoupled from each other without loss of optimality. However, modular solutions can potentially provide significant insights into the nature of efficient solutions. This project addresses the problem of integrated communications and control from a practically viable perspective by decomposing the problem into modular tasks. The introduced degree of modularity, despite its sub-optimality, enables practical and efficient solutions as well as insights into the inherent trade-offs. Because the questions that arise lie at the intersection between communications and controls research, the components of the project bring together expertise in decentralized control, networking, and signal processing through the following specific tasks: 1) Nonlinear coordinated control over dynamic graphs, 2) Crosslayer optimization of wireless networks in service of coordinated control, 3) Physical layer solutions to decentralized communication and control, and 4) Experimental performance evaluation on a 3D autonomous underwater vehicle test-bed at the University of Washington.