Coordination Control for Multiagent Systems with Underactuated Agent Dynamics
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Department Seminar Series
09/08 (Monday) Noon – 01:00 pm LC 400
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Coordination Control for Multiagent Systems
with Underactuated Agent Dynamics
Dr. Sergey G. Nersesov
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Villanova University
Villanova, PA
In this work, we develop a new integrated coordinated control and obstacle avoidance approach for a general class of underactuated agents. We use graph theoretic notions to characterize communication topology in the network of underactuated agents as determined by the information flow directions and captured by the graph Laplacian matrix. Obstacle avoidance is achieved by surrounding the stationary as well as moving obstacles by elliptical or other convex shapes that serve as stable periodic solutions to planar systems of ordinary differential equations and using transient trajectories of those systems to navigate the agents around the obstacles. Decentralized controllers for individual agents are designed using sliding mode control approach and are only based on data communicated from the neighboring agents. We demonstrate the efficacy of our theoretical approach using an example of a system of wheeled mobile robots that reach and maintain a desired formation and validate our results experimentally. The challenge still remains to coordinate the motion of heterogeneous vehicles with fundamentally different internal dynamics such as mobile ground robots, aerial vehicles, and surface vessels. This is a subject of the ongoing research.
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Biosketch
Sergey G. Nersesov received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Zhukovsky, Russia, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, with specialization in dynamics and control of aerospace vehicles. From 1998 to 1999 he served as a researcher in the Dynamics and Control Systems Division of the Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), Zhukovsky, Russia. In 2003 he received the M.S. degree in applied mathematics and in 2005 he received the Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering both from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University, Villanova, PA. His research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems and control theory, large-scale systems, cooperative control for multiagent systems, hierarchical nonlinear switching control, hybrid and impulsive control for nonlinear systems, system thermodynamics, and the mathematics of online social networks. Dr. Nersesov is a coauthor of the books Thermodynamics. A Dynamical Systems Approach (Princeton University Press, 2005), Impulsive and Hybrid Dynamical Systems. Stability, Dissipativity, and Control (Princeton University Press, 2006), and Large-Scale Dynamical Systems. A Vector Dissipative Systems Approach (Princeton University Press, 2011).