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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006
February 24, 12:00 p.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium
Karl Hedrick
University of California at Berkeley
"Collaborative control of unmanned vehicles"
Abstract: This talk will discuss the results of several research projects at Berkeley concerning vehicle automation, autonomy and collaboration. The first project was the design of an automated highway system, in particular the longitudinal control of tightly spaced “platoons” of vehicles. Issues of “string stability”, i.e. the attenuation of disturbances to the platoon will be discussed. The next project involved the control of multiple surface ships in order to create a floating aircraft runway. This was part of the “Mobile Off-Shore Base” program. The third project concerned the control of multiple unmanned helicopters, this project required the generalization of “string stability” to “mesh stability” since the helicopters are capable of 3-D motion. Finally I will discus our current project on collaborative control of unmanned aircraft. In this project the emphasis is less on formation control and more on distributed collaboration among multiple unmanned vehicles that are capable of vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The ability to have a single human command multiple vehicles at a very high level will be discussed. Experimental results from all of these projects will be presented.
Biography: Professor Hedrick is the James Marshall Wells Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Automatic Control Theory. His research focuses on the application of advanced control theory to a wide variety of vehicle dynamic systems including automotive, aircraft and ocean vehicles. He is currently the Director of Berkeley’s Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory as well as the PI of the Office of Naval Research center at Berkeley, the Center for the Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles.
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