Seminar: Maintaining Formations with a Directed Information Structure and Cycles
Speaker: Soura Dasgupta, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iowa
Date: October 10, 2011
Time: 1:10 p.m.
Location: 3043 ECpE Building Addition
Abstract: Dasgupta will address the n-agent formation shape maintenance problem in the plane. The objective is to design decentralized control laws so that the agents cooperatively restore a prescribed formation shape in the presence of small perturbations from the prescribed shape. We consider directed, cyclic information architectures associated with so-called minimally persistent formations. In our framework the formation shape is maintained by controlling certain interagent distances. Only one agent is responsible for maintaining each distance. We propose a decentralized control law where each agent executes its control using only the relative position measurements of agents it must maintain its distance to. The resulting nonlinear closed-loop system has a manifold of equilibria, which implies that the linearized system is nonhyperbolic. We apply center manifold theory to show local exponential stability of the desired formation shape. Choosing stabilizing gains is possible if a certain submatrix of the rigidity matrix of the graph representing the desired formation, has all leading principal minors nonzero, and we show that this condition holds for all minimally persistent formations with generic agent positions.
Speaker biography: Soura Dasgupta is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences, and a researcher for the Center for Computer-Aided Design at the University of Iowa. His special fields of knowledge include control theory, signal processing, and communications. Currently, his research interests are focused on synchronization, localization, control of multiagent systems, and consensus theory. Soura holds a PhD degree in systems engineering from the Australian National University (1985) and a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Queensland (1980). He is a fellow of IEEE.
Dr. Dasgupta is hosted by Aditya Ramamoorthy. Contact him (4-1583) if you would like to meet with Soura on Monday.