Distributed Control of Uncertain Systems

Part 1

The abundance of information and computational resources in multiple systems enable enhanced operational effectiveness through cooperative teamwork of multiple systems in civilian and military applications. Compared to a single system that performs a solo mission, greater efficiency and operational capability can be realized by a team of systems which operate in a coordinated fashion.

Cooperative control of multiple systems poses significant theoretical and practical challenges. First, the research objective is to develop a system which includes multiple subsystems rather than a single system. Second, the communication bandwidth and connectivity of the team are often limited and the interaction between systems may be unreliable.

Third, computational resources of each individual system will always be limited. In order to deal with these challenges, distributed control of multiple systems plays an important role and is one of effective control methods in solving cooperative control of multiple systems. Distributed cooperative control of multiple systems has been studied for decades. Early

study focused on the cooperative control of multiple linear systems and cooperative control of multiple nonlinear systems with special forms. In this project, it is proposed to study distributed cooperative control of multiple heterogeneous nonlinear systems with uncertainty. To this end, three research problems are proposed, i.e., distributed output tracking control of multiple uncertain linear systems, distributed output tracking control of multiple nonlinear systems, and distributed output tracking control of multiple uncertain nonlinear systems.

To solve the proposed problems, two systematic controller design approaches will be proposed with the aid of nonlinear control theory and distributed estimation theory. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed research results, experimental study will be conducted by implementing the proposed control laws in the multi-robot testbed in the PI's research laboratory.

Based on the experimental results, the proposed distributed control laws will be improved accordingly. Part 2

The proposed research problems are challenging due to the nonlinear nature of each system and the limited information of its neighbor systems. This project will solve the distributed cooperative control problem of multiple systems with different assumptions on the dynamics of each system and the communication among systems. The intellectual merits of this proposal are: 1. two novel distributed controller design approaches will be proposed for the proposed control problems; 2.

Distributed tracking controllers will be proposed for the proposed problems with the aid of the proposed approaches; and 3. the proposed controller design procedures can be applied to the distributed cooperative control problems of many practical control problems, such as flocking of mobile robots, formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles, etc.

The proposed research in this project has significant impact in civilian, homeland security, and military applications where multiple systems work cooperatively. The proposed research also has impact on the fields of biology, economics, physics, and computer science. The research plan will be integrated into an education plan including 1) undergraduate and graduate education and 2) broader dissemination of the research results.

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) is a predominantly Hispanic institute. The PI will mentor minority students and female students through his research. The PI will develop a graduate course and an undergraduate course which are related to this project.

The research results will be published in journals and conference proceedings. The PI will also work closely with his industrial partners to transfer research results.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.