Eric Kerrigan

Imperial College London

Wednesday, December 12, 2018, 11:00 - 12:30

Room 01-012, Georges-Köhler-Allee 102, Freiburg 79110, Germany

The communication energy in a wireless network of mobile autonomous agents should be defined to include the transmission energy as well as the propulsion energy used to facilitate information transfer.  In this talk, we will develop communication-theoretic and Newtonian dynamic models of the communication and locomotion expenditures of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) agents. These models are used to formulate a novel nonlinear optimal control problem (OCP) for arbitrary networks of autonomous agents. We consider the mobility as a decision variable in UAV networks with multiple access channels. Where possible, we will compare our results with known analytic solutions for particular single-hop network configurations. The OCP is then applied to a multiple-node UAV network for which previous results cannot be readily extended. We will present numerical results that demonstrate increased network capacity and communication energy savings upwards of 70% when compared to more naive communication policies.

Speaker's Biography

Eric Kerrigan is a Reader in Control Engineering and Optimization at Imperial College London. He received a BSc(Eng) from the University of Cape Town and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research is in the design of efficient numerical methods and computing architectures for solving optimal control problems in real-time, with applications in the design of aerospace, renewable energy and information systems. He is the chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Optimal Control, a Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.