CONTROL OF NETWORKED AND DISTRIBUTED HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEMS

Geir E. Dullerud, Associate Professor
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Affiliate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Research Associate Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory University of Illinois

We present recent developments in our effort to provide systematic strategies for control design of distributed systems which may operate over wireline or wireless networks.  New results and current work are presented on the control of distributed systems formed from the interconnection of multiple heterogeneous input-output subsystems. In particular we will discuss progress on two specific problems.  The first is control design over graph interconnections, and is aimed at addressing the need for synthesizing controllers that have a specific communication topology.  The second problem is that of designing systems where information is received with varying latency; our approach is by means of our work on Markovian jump linear systems.

Our new multi-vehicles testbed (HOTDEC) designed for extensive experimentation with the control issues arising from control over networks will also be presented.  It consists of autonomous hovercraft, wirelessly communicating with each other and users on the Internet.


BIO:

Geir E. Dullerud is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Research Associate Professor of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Prior to this he was Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo 1996-1998, after being a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1994-1995. In 1994 he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, England. He has published two books:  "A Course in Robust Control Theory" (with F. Paganini), Texts in Applied Mathematics, Springer, 2000, and "Control of Uncertain Sampled-data Systems", Birkhauser 1996. His areas of current research interest include networked and cooperative control, robotic vehicles, complex and hybrid dynamical systems.  In 1999 he received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and in 2005 the Xerox Faculty Research Award at UIUC.  He is currently visiting the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University.