COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina A Grid-Based Approach to Formation Control Damjan Miklic School of Electrical Engineering and Computing University of Zagreb Date: December 15, 2010 (Wednesday) Time: 1530-1630 (3:30-4:30pm) Place: Swearingen 3A75 Abstract In the last several decades, we have witnessed tremendous advances in the areas of electronics, sensor technology, electrical drives, computing and communications. Those technological advances have enabled the development of small vehicles that can sense their surroundings, process sensory information, move through the environment and manipulate objects autonomously, without any intervention by a human operator. The capabilities of such vehicles can be increased either by building ever bigger, more complex and powerful units, or by developing control and communication mechanisms that will enable a group of vehicles to cooperate and solve tasks in a coordinated manner. Using multiple vehicles to solve a task cooperatively can have a number of distinct advantages, including lower manufacturing and deployment costs, greater robustness, and tolerance to individual unit failures. The talk will be focused on methods and algorithms that can enable a group of autonomous vehicles to achieve a common goal. In particular, the formation control problem will be considered, which requires a group of units to achieve and maintain a specific spatial relationship between each other. Potential application areas include cooperative exploration, sensing and transportation, large-scale harvesting and formation flight. The proposed approach is based on space discretization using a virtual rectangular grid. This approach partitions the formation control problem into high-level formation planning in discrete time and space, and low-level control of individual vehicles. Modern discrete-event scheduling techniques are used for high level planning, and nonlinear control methods are applied at the lower level. Damjan Miklic received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Zagreb in 2005. He is currently a Ph.D. degree candidate at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, where he is also employed as a research and teaching assistant. Between August 2008 and August 2009, he was a visiting researcher with the MARHES Lab, at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, University of New Mexico, through the Fulbright exchange program. His research interests include coordinated control of autonomous robots, the use of unmanned vehicles in flexible manufacturing systems and simulation tools for robotics.