Decentralized Control in Multi-Agent Systems
Use of multiple autonomous agents offer several advantages over a single one. For example, multiple satellites flying in formation can be be used to detect distant stars which would otherwise require an extremely large satellite, and several UAVs can track a target much more accurately than a single UAV can. However, tight coordination between the agents is needed to achieve these objectives, which requires the design of novel feedback control alorithms. In particular, the control laws have to be decentralized, so that the control action at a particular agent depends only on information from nearby agents. Otherwise, if information from all the agents have to be transmitted to all other agents, the communications overhead will severly limit the number of agents. I am interested in developing methods for design of decentralized controllers and analyzing of the affect of interconnection topology on the performance of the closed loop system.