Invitation to the lecture: Decentralized Coordination and Abstraction for Coupled Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract:

High level planning and control of multi-agent systems constitute active research areas with various applications in robotics, power systems, sensor networks, and other engineering disciplines. For the coordination of multi-robot teams, it is additionally required that the agents satisfy relative state constraints which can guarantee collision avoidance and network connectivity based on the robots' sizes and sensing/communication ranges. Motivated by such objectives,  we present a robust connectivity maintenance control scheme, which is based on decentralized feedback laws and ensures that the network remains connected when bounded additive inputs are further assigned to the agents. These can provide to each agent the ability for high level planning, by leveraging a discrete representation, also called abstraction, of its interacting dynamics. We therefore present a framework on the derivation of distributed symbolic models for the agents, through appropriate space-time discretizations. The abstraction of each agent is based on the knowledge of its neighbors' discrete positions and the transitions are performed through hybrid control laws, which can drive the agent to its possible successor states. This approach is additionally modified towards the derivation of online abstractions, by discretizing overapproximations of the agents' reachable sets over a bounded time horizon. We finally outline how such  tools could be leveraged as building blocks for more complex multi-robot coordination scenarios including cooperative tasks such as collaborative transportation services.​

Brief bio:

Dimitris Boskos was born in Athens, Greece in 1981. He has received the Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, in 2005, the M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the NTUA in 2008 and the Ph.D. in Applied mathematics from the NTUA in 2014. Since August 2014, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Automatic Control, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests include distributed control of multi-agent systems, formal verification and observer design for nonlinear systems.