Distributed Optimal Control Strategies for Networked Multiagent Systems

April 2023 – April 2025

Objective
Our research project aims to propose a complete, fully distributed scheme in intelligent task allocation and security-based controller synthesis with relative displacement or bearing-only information for networked multi-agent systems like UAVs or UGVs. The designed methods are expected to be used directly in multiple unmanned autonomous systems. The research plays a significant role in improving the autonomy and swarming of the pursuit system and has great application potential in search and rescue, intelligent transportation, and public protection.

Background
Multiple autonomous unmanned systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and unmanned ground vehicles, are projected to play important roles in many industrial and societal applications, such as search and rescue, cooperative payload carrying, and warehouse management. In the community of multi-agent control, the pursuit-evasion game has been a hot topic whose objectives are to achieve optimal sensor placement intelligent and distributed task allocation, following which the control problem is formulated as a distributed optimization problem with a defined performance index. The objectives of this project thus include the exploration of cooperative and distributed optimal control strategies with relative position measurements or bearing-only information.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Panpan Zhou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Before joining KTH, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Bachelor’s degree in the School of Automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, in 2017 and her PhD from CUHK in 2021. Her research interests include control theory and applications of multi-agent systems and motion planning of micro aerial vehicles.

Main supervisor
Xiaoming Hu, professor, Department of Mathematics, KTH

Co-supervisor
Bo Wahlberg, professor, Division of Decision and Control Systems, KTH

Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event: