Speaker: Francesco Bullo

Title: Geometry, Optimization and Control in Robot Coordination

Abstract: Motion coordination is an extraordinary phenomenon in biological
systems and a powerful tool in man-made systems; although individual agents
have no global system knowledge, complex behaviors emerge from local
interactions. This talk focuses on robotic networks, that is, group of
robots that communicate and coordinate their motions to perform useful
tasks.  Example tasks are how to respond to service requests in an
environment, how to deploy sensor nodes in locations of interest, and how
to partition an environment among cooperating agents.  For these tasks, we
propose a comprehensive collection of adaptive and distributed algorithms,
including a novel a novel deployment and partitioning algorithm with
minimal communication requirements. Our approach integrates concepts from
queuing and stochastic analysis, geometric optimization, and nonlinear
stability theory.