Motion coordination is an extraordinary phenomenon in biological systems and a powerful tool in man-made systems. Although individual agents have no global knowledge of the system, complex behaviors emerge from local interactions. The subject of this talk is the design of motion-enabled sensor networks, i.e., networks where nodal motions are purposefully induced in order to perform useful tasks. Example scenarios include how to deploy sensor nodes in points of interest and how to exploit mobility in target tracking or boundary estimation. The algorithms combine distributed feedback, information processing and geometric structures. The key technical challenge is the design of adaptive behaviors that tolerate asynchronicity and communication/process failures.
Speaker Biography
Francesco Bullo received the Laurea degree “summa cum laude” in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1999. From 1998 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His students’ papers were finalists for the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2002, 2005, 2007), and the American Control Conference (2005, 2006). His research interests include motion planning and coordination for autonomous vehicles, and geometric control of mechanical systems.