ABSTRACT

Control of multi-agent systems and networked agents has been a popular topic of research with applications in autonomous unmanned vehicles and robotic assets. Planning, coordination and control for such complex systems is challenging due to the agents’ dynamics, restrictions in onboard power, sensing, communication and computation capabilities, the number of agents in the network, and uncertainty about the environment. In this talk we will present some of our recent results on the distributed semi-cooperative motion planning and coordination for multiple mobile agents that belong in different classes, which are defined in terms of their sensing/communication constraints and priorities. The proposed protocol achieves the on-the-fly prioritization among connected agents and preserves safety guarantees for the network with not all of the agents participating in conflict resolution and collision avoidance.

SHORT BIO

Dimitra Panagou received the Diploma and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. Since September 2014 she has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she was a postdoctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2012-2014), a visiting research scholar with the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania (June 2013, fall 2010) and a visiting research scholar with the University of Delaware, Mechanical Engineering Department (spring 2009). Her research interests include the fields of planning, coordination and distributed control of complex systems, with applications in unmanned aerial systems, robotic networks and autonomous multi-vehicle systems (ground, marine, aerial, space). She is a recipient of a NASA Early Faculty Career Award, of an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and member of the IEEE and the AIAA.