CDS/CIMMS Seminar:  Motion coordination for multi-agent networks

Dr. Francesco Bullo, University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Motion coordination is an extraordinary phenomenon in biological systems, such as schools of fishes, as well as a remarkable tool for man-made groups of robotic vehicles and active sensors. Even though each individual agent has no global knowledge of the system, complex coordinated behaviors emerge from local interactions. In this talk I will describe some recently-developed algorithms and tools for motion coordination. In particular, the focus is on algorithms for various coordination tasks such as network deployment over a given region, rendezvous at a point, and vehicle routing. The proposed control and communication laws achieve the various coordination objectives requiring only spatially-distributed information.

Biography
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Francesco Bullo received the Laurea degree "summa cum laude" in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1999.  From 1998 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is currently an Associate Professor with the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include motion planning and coordination for autonomous vehicles, geometric control of mechanical systems, and distributed and adaptive algorithms. He is the coauthor (with Andrew D. Lewis) of the book "Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems" (New York: Springer Verlag, 2004).