ECE Seminar Series: Towards a formal design of distributed cooperative systems

ECE title

ECE Seminar Series Fall 2014

Thursday October 23st, 1-2 PM, ITEB 336

Towards a formal design of distributed cooperative systems

 Hai Lin

Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame

 

 Abstract: A common challenge in our future engineered system design, such as power grids, intelligent transportation networks and flexible-manufacturing systems, is how to make a large number of distributed systems work together in a reliable and efficient manner. Existing methods are either only suitable for small scale systematic synthesis, oversimplifying the nodal dynamics, or fail to adapt to changing environments. This motivates our research aiming at a scalable, correct-by-construction formal design methodology for distributed cooperative systems. In particular, we focus on a formal design of multi-robot systems that can guarantee the accomplishment of high-level team missions through automatic synthesis of local coordination mechanisms and control laws. The basic idea is to decompose the team mission into individual subtasks such that the design can be reduced to local synthesis problems for individual robots. Multidisciplinary approaches combining hybrid systems, supervisory control, inference deduction and model checking are utilized to achieve this goal. The developed theory will enable robots in the team to cooperatively learn their individual roles in a mission, and then automatically synthesize local supervisors to fulfill their subtasks. A salient feature of the proposed method lies on its ability to handle environmental uncertainties and un-modeled dynamics as we do not require an explicit model of the transition dynamics of each agent and their interactions with the environment. In addition, the design is on-line and reactive enabling the robot team to adapt to changing environments and dynamic tasking.

 

Short Bio: Hai Lin obtained his B.S. degree at the University of Science and Technology Beijing and his M.S. degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1997 and 2000 respectively. In 2005, he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Lin is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame. Before returning to his alma mater, Hai has been working as an assistant professor in the National University of Singapore from 2006 to 2011. Dr. Lin’s teaching and research interests are in the multidisciplinary study of the problems at the intersections of control, communication, computation and life sciences. His current research thrust is on cyber-physical systems, multi-robot cooperative tasking, systems biology and hybrid control. Hai has been served in several committees and editorial board. He is the Program Chair for IEEE ICCA 2011, IEEE CIS 2011 and the Chair for IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Singapore Chapter for 2009 and 2010. He is a recipient of 2013 NSF CAREER award and a senior member of IEEE.

 

 

Host: Peng Zhang, peng@engr.uconn.edu

Categories: Miscellaneous

Published: October 15, 2014

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