Coordinated control of multiple robotic platforms, multi-vehicles, or groups of mobile agents is a rich and fascinating research field and has great commercial and military impact. This project seeks to achieve coordinated, goal oriented task level control with robustness, failure-tolerance, and distributed implementation. The PI proposes 1) a probabilistic approach to address the robustness issue of the coordinated control subject to parametric uncertainty, dynamically changing operating conditions, and the change of neighboring interaction between mobile agents, and 2) a quorum-system based architecture that defines the neighboring interaction, information flow and communication configuration of a group of mobile agents. The probabilistic approach has a better modeling of the real world with less conservativeness; it provides reduced control complexity and enhanced performance and efficient use of control effort. The proposed feedback control is built on a new architecture that targets distributed implementation and failure-tolerance under the constraints of limited communication bandwidth. The proposed paradigm for coordinated control of groups of mobile autonomous agents will provide a high degree of autonomy for distributed execution of elemental, high bandwidth tasks, allowing the operator to interact with the system of platforms at a high level. The intellectual merit lies in the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which will hopefully foster new paradigms for coordinated control of groups of mobile agents, and spawn new topics for further research. The educational plan includes a strengthening and integration of interdisciplinary research topics of robust control and distributed algorithms in a graduate level control course. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed educational activities, the PI plans to collaborate with colleagues at the Penn State's Leonard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The PI herself is a female member of the faculty; she will continue to work with the Women in Engineering Program (WEP) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Penn State to recruit women and minorities for graduate study, and to encourage them to pursue academic careers after graduation.
