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Situational Awareness using Information-Driven Control of Networked Autonomous Vehicles

Thursday, May 3, 3:30PM – 5PM
POB 6.304

Reza Olfati-Saber

Mobile sensor networks comprised of cooperative networks of autonomous vehicles with embedded sensing, control, communication, and computing devices interacting with human operators have broad applications in security and surveillance systems and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). The main objective in deployment of mobile sensor networks is to track a set of critical targets/events of interest that occur in an environment that is called "situational awareness". We show that distributed tracking of targets using mobile sensor networks is fundamentally a coupled estimation and control problem that we refer to as "information-driven control". Two main cases of information-driven control for mobile sensor networks will be addressed using a coupled Distributed Kalman Filtering (DKF) and a flocking-based mobility-control algorithm. A theoretical framework for formal stability analysis of a complex sensing & control system applying the information-driven control algorithm will be provided. Our proposed solution relies on a combination of recently developed DKF and multi-objective flocking algorithms of the speaker as well as the Fisher Information Matrix of the sensed data. Simulation results of the information-driven control algorithms for tracking high-valued targets and distributed deployment of mobile sensors for situational awareness will be presented.

Bio:

Dr. Olfati-Saber received his PhD and SM degrees from MIT in 2001 and 1997, respectively. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Control and Dynamical Systems Department at Caltech (2001-04) and a visiting scientist at the Mechanical and Aerospace Department at UCLA (2004-05) prior to joining Dartmouth. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Thayer School of Engineering. Dr. Olfati-Saber is the recipient of the 2010 PECASE award (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) and the 2008 NSF CAREER award. He is the author of three seminal papers and his top five papers are combined over 5500 times cited. His research interests include distributed control and estimation, robotics, intelligent transportation systems, human-in-the-loop systems, and complex networks.

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