Related papers: One Ring to Rule Them All: Constrained Distributio…
Ensemble control offers rich and diverse opportunities in mathematical systems theory. In this paper, we present a new paradigm of ensemble control, referred to as distributional control, for ensemble systems. We shift the focus from…
We seek methods to model, control, and analyze robot teams performing environmental monitoring tasks. During environmental monitoring, the goal is to have teams of robots collect various data throughout a fixed region for extended periods…
In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic control framework for efficiently controlling an ensemble of quantum systems that can also compensate for the interaction of the systems with the external environment. The main challenge in…
In this letter, we present a constraint-driven optimal control framework that achieves emergent cluster flocking within a constrained 2D environment. We formulate a decentralized optimal control problem that includes safety, flocking, and…
Controlling a large population, in the limit, a continuum, of structurally identical dynamical systems with parametric variations is a pervasive task in diverse applications in science and engineering. However, the severely underactuated…
A number of coordinated behaviors have been proposed for achieving specific tasks for multi-robot systems. However, since most applications require more than one such behavior, one needs to be able to compose together sequences of behaviors…
Ensemble systems, pervasive in diverse scientific and engineering domains, pose challenges to existing control methods due to their massive scale and underactuated nature. This paper presents a dynamic moment approach to addressing…
The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…
In this paper, we study the control of a class of time-invariant linear ensemble systems whose natural dynamics are linear in the system parameter. This class of ensemble control systems arises from practical engineering and physical…
In this article, we investigate the problem of simultaneously steering an uncountable family of finite dimensional time-varying linear systems. We call this class of control problems Ensemble Control, a notion coming from the study of spin…
A number of important modern applications in optimal control can be formulated as open loop control problems in which the underlying dynamical systems are subject to random inputs. These so-called ensemble control problems require the…
A group of wheeled robots with nonholonomic constraints is considered to rendezvous at a common specified setpoint with a desired orientation while maintaining network connectivity and ensuring collision avoidance within the robots. Given…
Ensemble control, an emerging research field focusing on the study of large populations of dynamical systems, has demonstrated great potential in numerous scientific and practical applications. Striking examples include pulse design for…
This paper addresses a safe planning and control problem for mobile robots operating in communication- and sensor-limited dynamic environments. In this case the robots cannot sense the objects around them and must instead rely on…
Any strategy used to distribute a robot ensemble over a set of sequential tasks is subject to inaccuracy due to robot-level uncertainties and environmental influences on the robots' behavior. We approach the problem of inaccuracy during…
The objective of designing a control system is to steer a dynamical system with a control signal, guiding it to exhibit the desired behavior. The Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) partial differential equation offers a framework for optimal…
We introduce the use of hierarchical clustering for relaxed, deterministic coordination and control of multiple robots. Traditionally an unsupervised learning method, hierarchical clustering offers a formalism for identifying and…
Guaranteeing safe behavior on complex autonomous systems -- from cars to walking robots -- is challenging due to the inherently high dimensional nature of these systems and the corresponding complex models that may be difficult to determine…
In this paper we present a reformulation--framed as a constrained optimization problem--of multi-robot tasks which are encoded through a cost function that is to be minimized. The advantages of this approach are multiple. The…
Ensemble systems appear frequently in many engineering applications and, as a result, they have become an important research topic in control theory. These systems are best characterized by the evolution of their underlying state…