Large Scale Complex Multiagent Systems : Control Methodologies and Information Architectures. Future military operations are likely to involve increasing use of unmanned vehicles, airborne, underwater or on land. In some cases there will be very large formations. This research will develop methodologies which allow formations of unmanned vehicles to be configured. Much of the same methodology is applicable to the construction and operation of large scale sensor networks, identified by some comm ....Large Scale Complex Multiagent Systems : Control Methodologies and Information Architectures. Future military operations are likely to involve increasing use of unmanned vehicles, airborne, underwater or on land. In some cases there will be very large formations. This research will develop methodologies which allow formations of unmanned vehicles to be configured. Much of the same methodology is applicable to the construction and operation of large scale sensor networks, identified by some commentators as one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. They comprise large numbers of low cost networked sensors and will increasingly find application in security, agricultural and environmental monitoring.Read moreRead less
Development of robust adaptive and nonlinear control methodologies. Techniques will be developed that will allow industrial plants to operate with lower direct or environmental cost, and airborne vehicles to operate more efficiently or more safely.
Safe Adaptive Control. Adaptive controllers are intelligent controllers, which can redesign themselves as they learn more about the environment. There are many algorithms for adaptive controllers; some of them can cause unacceptable behaviour during the learning process. Safe adaptive controllers are those for which this behaviour is ruled out. This project is concerned with developing procedures for guaranteeing the safety property in a wide variety of situations.
Numerical Algorithms for Solving Convex Optimization Problems Arising in Systems and Control Theory. The need to optimize occurs frequently in engineering applications. Typically one has a set of constraints specifying what solutions are allowable or meet design specifications and one would like to choose from these allowable solutions one which is optimal with respect to some meaningful metric. Such optimization problems tend to be rather complicated and must be solved numerically. This project ....Numerical Algorithms for Solving Convex Optimization Problems Arising in Systems and Control Theory. The need to optimize occurs frequently in engineering applications. Typically one has a set of constraints specifying what solutions are allowable or meet design specifications and one would like to choose from these allowable solutions one which is optimal with respect to some meaningful metric. Such optimization problems tend to be rather complicated and must be solved numerically. This project is concerned with creating improved numerical algorithms for solving particular important classes of optimization problems that arise in systems and control theory.Read moreRead less
Mathematical, logical and computational foundations of hybrid control systems, and their application to design and synthesis problems in control engineering. Hybrid control systems are mathematical models of heterogeneous systems consisting of digital computer components interacting in real-time with continuous physical processes. Their many engineering applications include air traffic control, medical technology and automated transport. Motivated by such safety-critical and high-confidence appl ....Mathematical, logical and computational foundations of hybrid control systems, and their application to design and synthesis problems in control engineering. Hybrid control systems are mathematical models of heterogeneous systems consisting of digital computer components interacting in real-time with continuous physical processes. Their many engineering applications include air traffic control, medical technology and automated transport. Motivated by such safety-critical and high-confidence applications, the project aims to develop a unified framework of mathematical logics adequate to formally represent and reason about the structure, behaviour, and properties of hybrid control systems, and use this to develop methodologies for automatically synthesising hybrid control programs that are provably correct with respect to their specifications. Other outcomes include prototype software implementations of hybrid controller design tools.Read moreRead less