Magnus Egerstedt – författare

A revolutionary new framework that draws on insights from ecology for the design and analysis of long-duration robotsRobots are increasingly leaving the confines of laboratories, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities, venturing into agriculture and other settings where they must operate in uncertain conditions over long timescales. This multidisciplinary book draws on the principles of ecology to show how robots can take full advantage of the environments they inhabit, including as sources of energy.Magnus Egerstedt introduces a revolutionary new design paradigm—robot ecology—that makes it possible to achieve long-duration autonomy while avoiding catastrophic failures. Central to ecology is the idea that the richness of an organism’s behavior is a function of the environmental constraints imposed by its habitat. Moving beyond traditional strategies that focus on optimal policies for making robots achieve targeted tasks, Egerstedt explores how to use survivability constraints to produce both effective and provably safe robot behaviors. He blends discussions of ecological principles with the development of control barrier functions as a formal approach to constraint-based control design, and provides an in-depth look at the design of the SlothBot, a slow and energy-efficient robot used for environmental monitoring and conservation.Visionary in scope, Robot Ecology presents a comprehensive and unified methodology for designing robots that can function over long durations in diverse natural environments.

Splines, both interpolatory and smoothing, have a long and rich history that has largely been application driven. This book unifies these constructions in a comprehensive and accessible way, drawing from the latest methods and applications to show how they arise naturally in the theory of linear control systems. Magnus Egerstedt and Clyde Martin are leading innovators in the use of control theoretic splines to bring together many diverse applications within a common framework. In this book, they begin with a series of problems ranging from path planning to statistics to approximation. Using the tools of optimization over vector spaces, Egerstedt and Martin demonstrate how all of these problems are part of the same general mathematical framework, and how they are all, to a certain degree, a consequence of the optimization problem of finding the shortest distance from a point to an affine subspace in a Hilbert space. They cover periodic splines, monotone splines, and splines with inequality constraints, and explain how any finite number of linear constraints can be added. This book reveals how the many natural connections between control theory, numerical analysis, and statistics can be used to generate powerful mathematical and analytical tools. This book is an excellent resource for students and professionals in control theory, robotics, engineering, computer graphics, econometrics, and any area that requires the construction of curves based on sets of raw data.

This accessible book provides an introduction to the analysis and design of dynamic multiagent networks. Such networks are of great interest in a wide range of areas in science and engineering, including: mobile sensor networks, distributed robotics such as formation flying and swarming, quantum networks, networked economics, biological synchronization, and social networks. Focusing on graph theoretic methods for the analysis and synthesis of dynamic multiagent networks, the book presents a powerful new formalism and set of tools for networked systems. The book''s three sections look at foundations, multiagent networks, and networks as systems. The authors give an overview of important ideas from graph theory, followed by a detailed account of the agreement protocol and its various extensions, including the behavior of the protocol over undirected, directed, switching, and random networks. They cover topics such as formation control, coverage, distributed estimation, social networks, and games over networks. And they explore intriguing aspects of viewing networks as systems, by making these networks amenable to control-theoretic analysis and automatic synthesis, by monitoring their dynamic evolution, and by examining higher-order interaction models in terms of simplicial complexes and their applications. The book will interest graduate students working in systems and control, as well as in computer science and robotics. It will be a standard reference for researchers seeking a self-contained account of system-theoretic aspects of multiagent networks and their wide-ranging applications. This book has been adopted as a textbook at the following universities: ?

Dancing humanoids, robotic art installations, and music generated by mathematically precise methods are no longer science fiction; in fact they are the subject of this book. This first-of-its-kind anthology assembles technical research that makes such creations possible. In order to mechanize something as enigmatic and personal as dance, researchers must delve deeply into two distinct academic disciplines: control theory and art. Broadly, this research uses techniques from the world of art to inspire methods in control, enables artistic endeavours using advanced control theory and aids in the analysis of art using metrics devised by a systems theoretic approach.

To ensure that artistic influences are well represented, the individual chapters are focused so that they relate their contribution to the arts meaningfully and explicitly. Specially composed introductions set up the contributions either in terms of inspiration by artistic principles or their contribution to the arts through new analysis tools. To facilitate this, the majority of the chapters are authored jointly by experts in control theory and by artists, including dancers, choreographers, puppeteers and painters. Connections between controls and art then permeate the text so that these important relationships play a central role in the book.

Controls and Art surveys current projects in this area—including a disco dancing robot, a reactive museum exhibit and otherworldly music—and illuminates open problems and topics for research in this emerging interdisciplinary field. It will draw attention both from experts in robotics and control interested in developing the artistic side of their creations and from academics studying dance, theater, music and the visual arts with an interest in avant-garde means of production.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing, interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, communication and control systems, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems.

This volume of proceedings includes 43 original contributions presented at the Tenth International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2010), which was held in November 2010 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into four parts, each representing one critical and long-term research thrust in the multi-robot community: distributed sensing (Part I); localization, navigation, and formations (Part II); coordination algorithms and formal methods (Part III); modularity, distributed manipulation, and platforms (Part IV).