UTARI Seminar – STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF COOPERATING TEAMS OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS by Kamesh Subbarao, PhD

Each seminar highlights a different speaker who will discuss their latest research projects, cutting-edge technology or what is happening within certain technological industries. These industries include biomedical technologies or microsystems, assistive technologies, automation and intelligent systems, unmanned systems, advanced manufacturing and composite materials.

Topic:

STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF COOPERATING TEAMS OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

Abstract:

Traditional control design methodologies can guarantee stability and performance of systems modeled as linear time invariant systems. However, when multiple such “optimal” vehicles are put together in a team, what guarantees for stability and performance can one expect? This talk focuses on this aspect. The well-known linear parameter varying control methodology is adopted to develop a full envelop robust controller for high performance aerial vehicles. A novel distributed version of this controller will be introduced that addresses the challenge of the computational effort required for synthesizing a robust controller for the group. This novel framework provides performance guarantees and can be rapidly evaluated for sufficiently large groups. The presentation will also discuss some procedures to compute stability and robustness margins as well as input time delays to address the communication among multiple vehicles. The results are less conservative and more accurate than the current state-of-the-art algorithms. Some interesting modalities that allow hackers to compromise a mission will be shown that are derived purely from this robust control framework. The presentation will focus on a novel uncertainty quantification framework which allows us to compute the sensitivity of the performance to individual vehicle connectivity – some intuitive connection topologies will be discussed in this context. While the frameworks mentioned previously will be shown in the context of multiple cooperating unmanned vehicles, the presentation will also underscore the applicability to many classes of mechanical, and aerospace systems.

Bio:

Dr. Kamesh Subbarao is Professor and director of the Aerospace Systems Laboratory (ASL) in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He received his PhD from the department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A & M University, College Station in 2001. After his PhD he worked as an Applications Developer at The MathWorks Inc. (2001-2003) in the Controls and Systems Identification and Estimation Toolboxes group. His research interests span flight mechanics, simulation and control, astrodynamics, nonlinear and adaptive control, linear and nonlinear filtering/estimation approaches, cooperation and coordination for multiple unmanned vehicles subject to measurement uncertainties and distributed time delays

Dr. Subbarao’s research has been funded by DARPA, NSF, AFRL, ONR, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Whirlpool Inc., Nextgen Aeronautics and Hypercomp Inc. He received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021, and the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016. Previously he received the AIAA Foundation Award for “Model Reference Adaptive Control” in 2001. He has also been nominated by the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as well as the College of Engineering for numerous other teaching and research awards, including Provost’s Teaching Award, Board of Regents Teaching Award, Outstanding Young Faculty Award, Provost’s Excellence in Research Award. He was also nominated for the Outstanding Academic Advisor Award in 2018-19 and again in 2020-21. He has authored and co-authored more than 175 journal and peer reviewed conference publications.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (FRAeS), and the American Astronautical Society. He is also an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and Senior Member of IEEE, and ASME

Date:

October 29, 2021

Time:

12:00pm

Location:

UTARI Auditorium

7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S, Fort Worth, 76118

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