Abstract. While autonomous vehicles that perform solo missions can yield significant benefits, greater efficiency and operational capability will be realized from teams of autonomous vehicles operating in a coordinated fashion. Potential applications for networked multiple autonomous vehicles include environmental monitoring, search and rescue, space-based interferometers, hazardous material handling, and combat, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Networked multi-vehicle systems place high demands on features such as low cost, high adaptivity and scalability, increased flexibility, great robustness, and easy maintenance. To meet these demands, the current trend is to design distributed control algorithms that rely on only local interaction to achieve global group behavior. The purpose of this talk is to overview our recent research in distributed control of networked multi-vehicle systems. Theoretical results on distributed leaderless consensus with vehicle dynamics including first- and second-order linear dynamics, rigid body attitude dynamics, and Euler-Lagrange dynamics, distributed single-leader collective tracking with reduced interaction and partial measurements, distributed multi-leader containment control with local interaction, distributed average tracking with multiple time-varying reference signals, and distributed optimization with non-identical constraints will be introduced. Application examples in multi-vehicle cooperative control including rendezvous, formation keeping, and cooperative herding for wheeled mobile robots, UAV formation flying, deep space spacecraft attitude alignment, and synchronization of networked robotic arms will also be introduced.

Bio. Wei Ren received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2004. From October 2004 to July 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He was an assistant professor (August 2005 to June 2010) and an associate professor (July 2010 to June 2011) with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Utah State University, Logan. Since July 2011, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research focuses on distributed control of multi-agent systems, autonomous control of unmanned vehicles, and cyber-physical systems. He is an author of two books Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks (Springer-Verlag, 2011) and Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control (Springer-Verlag, 2008). Dr. Ren was the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for Automatica and Systems and Control Letters and an Associate Editor on the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board.