Title: Time-Critical Cooperative Path-Following Control of Multiple UAVs
Speaker: Prof. Naira Hovakimyan
Affiliation: Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Location: Room 212 William Penny
Time: 2:00pm
Abstract. Worldwide, there has been growing interest in the use of autonomous vehicles to execute cooperative missions of increasing complexity without constant supervision of human operators. Despite significant progress in the field of cooperative control, several challenges need to be addressed to develop strategies capable of yielding robust performance of a fleet in the presence of complex vehicle dynamics, communications constraints, and partial vehicle failures. In this talk, we will present a theoretical framework for the development of decentralized strategies for cooperative motion control of multiple vehicles that must meet stringent spatial and temporal constraints. The approach adopted applies to teams of heterogeneous systems, and does not necessarily lead to swarming behavior. Flight test results of a coordinated road search mission involving multiple small tactical UAVs will be discussed to demonstrate the efficacy of the multi-vehicle cooperative control framework presented.
About the speaker. Naira Hovakimyan received her M.S. in Theoretical Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in 1988 from Yerevan State University in Armenia. She received her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics in 1992, in Moscow, from the Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, majoring in optimal control and differential games. In 1997 she was awarded a governmental postdoctoral scholarship to work in INRIA, France. In 1998 she was invited to the School of Aerospace Engineering of Georgia Tech, where she worked as a research faculty member until 2003. In 2003 she joined the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering of Virginia Tech, and in 2008 she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is a professor and Schaller faculty scholar. She is the 2011 recipient of the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award. She has coauthored one book and more than 250 refereed publications. Her research interests are in the theory of robust adaptive control and estimation with an emphasis on aerospace applications, control in the presence of limited information, networks of autonomous systems and game theory. She is an associate fellow and life member of AIAA, a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of AMS and ISDG.