GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006

February 23, 12:00 p.m., Berger Auditorium, Skirkanich Hall (210 S. 33rd Street)

Murat Arcak
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

"Passivity as Design Tool for Cooperative Control" 

Abstract: In this talk we formulate a cooperative control problem in which the objective is to steer the differences between output variables of the agents to a prescribed compact set via distributed feedback rules. This formulation encompasses several formation stabilization and synchronization problems as special cases. When the information flow between neighboring agents is bidirectional, we show that the passivity properties of the individual components guarantee stability of the network. By exploiting this structure we develop a feedback design methodology and proceed to study the robustness of the resulting feedback laws in the presence of a time-varying communication topology. The next topic discussed is an adaptive design strategy for the agents when the reference velocity of the group is available only to a leader. We conclude the talk with a brief discussion on extending this framework to accommodate complex agent dynamics, such as rigid bodies and flexible structures, with the help of their inherent passivity properties.

Biography: Murat Arcak is an associate professor of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997 and 2000, under the direction of Petar Kokotovic. Dr. Arcak’s research is in nonlinear control theory and its applications, with particular interest in robust and observer-based feedback designs and in analysis and design of networks of dynamic systems.


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