CISE Seminar: Fei Chen, Systems Engineering Visiting Scholar

Funnel Control for Leader-Follower Multi-Agent Systems and Its Application to STL Tasks

Significant research has been devoted to the problem of distributed formation control of multi-agent systems. These distributed strategies are usually for all agents and sometimes it may be redundant and costly since the desired tasks may be fulfilled by steering part of the agents through the appropriately designed local control strategy. Therefore, we instead consider a general leader-follower framework, where a group of agents with external inputs are selected as leaders in order to drive the group of followers in a way that the entire system can achieve the target formation within certain prescribed performance transient bounds. Then, we investigate the topological conditions on the leader-follower networks under which we can design the leaders to achieve the target formation within such prescribed transient bounds. In this leader-follower framework, we also apply the formal methods based approaches in order to specify more complex and high-level task specifications that cannot be easily defined as classic control objectives. Signal Temporal Logic (STL), which is based on continuous time signals, has the added feature of formulating both time and space constraints, and thus provides potentials to deal with quantitative transient constraints for multi-agent systems. Therefore, we propose a funnel-based approach for the cooperative control of leader-follower multi-agent systems under STL specifications.

Fei Chen is currently a Ph.D. student in the Division of Decision and Control Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). He received his M.Sc. degree from the Systems and Control group in the Electrical Engineering Department at Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands) in 2016. He received his B.Sc. degree in the Department of Control Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University (China) in 2014. His research interests are situated on the edge between control theory and formal methods in computer science, with particular interests in formal verification and control synthesis for multi-agent systems under temporal logic specifications.

Faculty Host: Christos Cassandras

Student Host: Ahmad Ahmad

When 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm on Friday, February 3, 2023
Location 8 Saint Mary's Street (PHO 203)