ABSTRACT

This talk addresses the general topic of cooperative navigation and motion control of marine autonomous robotic vehicles, both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. The presentation is rooted in practical developments and experiments. Examples of scientific mission scenarios with autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), acting alone or in cooperation, set the stage for the main contents of the presentation. From a theoretical standpoint, special attention is given to a number of challenging problems that include: cooperative motion control strategies of a fleet of autonomous vehicles in the presence of complex vehicle dynamics and severe acoustic-based navigation and communication constraints, where the latter are imposed by intermittent failures and latency; nonlinear control, optimal control, minimum-energy estimators, and networked control. The efficacy of some of the systems developed will be illustrated with videos from actual field tests with multiple marine robots and a human diver in the loop.

Short Bio:

A. Pedro Aguiar - PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal. Currently, Dr. Aguiar holds an Associate Professor position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC), Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP). From 2002 to 2005, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Control, Dynamical-Systems, and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). From 2005 to 2012, he was a senior researcher with the Institute for Systems and Robotics at IST (ISR/IST), and an invited assistant professor with the DEEC of IST. Expertise in Dynamical Systems Theory, Trajectory Tracking and Path Following Techniques, Nonlinear Control, and Networked Control and Estimation. Associate Editor of IFAC Automatica.

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