OPTEC - K.U.Leuven Center of Excellence: Optimization in Engineering

"Distributed Constrained Optimal Control of Large-Scale Interconnected Systems"
Tamas Keviczky (T.U.Delft)

Large-scale engineering systems composed of interconnected components can be found in a broad spectrum of applications ranging from networks of independently actuated vehicles in robotics and formation flight to industrial process control and civil engineering. The presentation will focus on distributed control design methods for these systems using constrained optimal control techniques. Interest in such problems is usually motivated by the necessity of avoiding centralized design when this becomes computationally prohibitive or would require unrealistic expectations regarding information exchange. In particular, a distributed predictive control scheme will be described with a discussion on stability and feasibility related questions. Recent results in distributed design for a special class of large-scale systems using LQR controllers will also be summarized.

Applicability of the proposed framework will be demonstrated using the formation control problem of multiple Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) as a motivating example. This particular application problem has a wide range of envisioned applications including distributed sensing and monitoring, which appear to be the most promising ones. The challenge in UAV formation flight is to formulate simple local problems and design individual controllers which would enable the UAVs to meet certain maneuvering challenges while maintaining relative positions and safe distances between each vehicle. This objective is achieved by developing distributed control laws for cooperative multi-vehicle groups using constrained optimal control theory and their demonstration on high-fidelity models of an actual unmanned hovering vehicle platform.