ISIS will be visited by Prof. Mike Zavlanos from Stevens Institute of Technology February 25-26, 2010. He will give a talk at ISIS about Distributed Control of Networked Robots and Systems. The presentation will be held on Friday , February 26th in the Large Conference Room at 2015 Terrace Place, the abstract is included below.

Title: Distributed Control of Networked Robots and Systems

Abstract:
The field of robotics is evolving from single monolithic robots to teams of small but interconnected robots achieving global objectives using local coordination. Coordinated missions for teams of mobile robots include coordinated estimation, surveillance, and coverage, coordinated satellite alignment and synchronization, as well as distributed placement and assignment in creating desirable team structures. The fundamental challenge in such problems is the design of local rules, such as distributed controllers and estimators, which, by local coordination, give rise to the desired global objectives.

In this talk, I will first present a distributed, scalable, and verifiable algorithm that allows teams of robots to dynamically create any desired structure, characterized by the relative locations of the robots in it, using local coordination rules. This is achieved using a combination of potential fields and assignment coordination protocols. I will then address the problem of maintaining connectivity in robotic networks, where the robot nodes are mobile. The proposed solution is not only the first distributed solution to this problem, but has been both theoretically and experimentally verified, and can be composed with other objectives to give robotic structures that can adapt to environmental changes and handle node failures.