Cooperative Control of Heterogeneous Networked Dynamic Systems with Application in Coordination of Networked Mobile Robots

Description

A networked dynamic system, which consists of a group of subsystems connected via acommunication network, can be used to describe many practical control systems such asnetworked mobile robots, networked micro-satellites, teams of unmanned aerial orunderwater vehicles, and so on. A key advantage of networked dynamic systems is thatthey are scalable, robust to local subsystem failure or communication failure, and able tocarry out much more complex tasks than a single subsystem. Due to this advantage andtheir great potential in military and industrial applications, cooperative control ofnetworked dynamic systems has attracted increasing attention in control community.Lots of efforts have been devoted to study on cooperative control of networked dynamicsystems and significant progress has been made. However, the recent literature reviewreveals that there are still many issues to be addressed. For example, one issue is how todeal with cooperative control of heterogeneous networked systems with more generalsubsystem dynamics which might be subject to different disturbances and/oruncertainties, as most of existing works consider homogeneous networked systems withsimple subsystem dynamics subject to neither disturbance nor uncertainty, which mightnot be the case for many practical applications. Another issue is how to deal with variouscommunication constraints of networks such as packet dropouts and time-delays whichwould naturally arise in networked dynamic systems and are known to have greatadverse impact on their performance. This project, by addressing those issues, willinvestigate and develop novel approaches and methodologies for cooperative control ofheterogeneous networked dynamic systems subject to disturbances and/or uncertaintieswith communication constraints. The outcomes of this project are expected to providemore design tools for cooperative control of networked dynamic systems with highpotential in real applications.