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Click here to search FindAPhD.com for PhD studentship opportunitiesEngSci-ELM-103: Distributed Collaboration of Complex Networked Systems of Multiple Autonomous Agents
Dr Zhan Shu, Dr Bing Chu
Applications accepted all year round
About the Project
Collaborative behaviours of networked multiple autonomous agents are abundant in nature and human societies, e.g., flocks of birds, schools of fish, and swarms of locusts. These behaviours exist to permit sophisticated group functionalities with substantial fault tolerance and robustness properties, which cannot be achieved by individual members. This has inspired considerable theoretical research and many interesting engineering applications, e.g., formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles, data fusion of sensor networks, and load balancing of distributed grids. However, due to the large number of agents in the system, the intrinsic dynamics of each agent, and the complexity of their interactions, the analysis and synthesis of complex multiple autonomous systems bring significantly new challenges that have never been encountered. There is a growing and pressing demand in both academic and industrial communities for effective tools to analyse and synthesise such systems.
This joint project with School of Electronics and Computer Science will tackle several important problems for complex networked systems with multiple autonomous agents from a systems and control theoretic perspective. We will first study how local dynamics, topological connections, and communication constraints would affect global collaborative behaviours, and establish rigorous characterisation on these relationships. Based on this, local control strategies, topological structures, and communication protocols will be designed to achieve desired global collaborations such as consensus, distributed formation, cooperative estimation and control, etc.. The proposed algorithms and protocols will then be applied to several problems arising from practical engineering applications. The developed results will be verified using both numerical simulation and experiments on a multiple UAV test platform.
The impact of the proposed research is prominent and promising. The successful completion of this project will not only deepen understanding on the principle and theory of complex networked systems with multiple autonomous agents, but also establish effective analysis and design techniques towards new engineering applications.
This project is being offered as a potential project area for the complex systems simulation doctoral training centre at the University of Southampton, please see: http://www.icss.soton.ac.uk/ for more details on the doctoral programme and the full application process
If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Zhan Shu, Electro-Mechanical Engineering research group, FEE. Email: [Email Address Removed] Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 3687 or Bing Chu, Communications, Signal Processing and Control group, School of Electronics and Computer Science. Email: [Email Address Removed] Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 6653
This joint project with School of Electronics and Computer Science will tackle several important problems for complex networked systems with multiple autonomous agents from a systems and control theoretic perspective. We will first study how local dynamics, topological connections, and communication constraints would affect global collaborative behaviours, and establish rigorous characterisation on these relationships. Based on this, local control strategies, topological structures, and communication protocols will be designed to achieve desired global collaborations such as consensus, distributed formation, cooperative estimation and control, etc.. The proposed algorithms and protocols will then be applied to several problems arising from practical engineering applications. The developed results will be verified using both numerical simulation and experiments on a multiple UAV test platform.
The impact of the proposed research is prominent and promising. The successful completion of this project will not only deepen understanding on the principle and theory of complex networked systems with multiple autonomous agents, but also establish effective analysis and design techniques towards new engineering applications.
This project is being offered as a potential project area for the complex systems simulation doctoral training centre at the University of Southampton, please see: http://www.icss.soton.ac.uk/ for more details on the doctoral programme and the full application process
If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Zhan Shu, Electro-Mechanical Engineering research group, FEE. Email: [Email Address Removed] Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 3687 or Bing Chu, Communications, Signal Processing and Control group, School of Electronics and Computer Science. Email: [Email Address Removed] Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 6653
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