Talk of Prof. Antonis Papachristodoulou

January 24, 2025, 2:00 p.m. (CET)

--- Title: Analysis and Design of Safe Control Laws

Time: January 24, 2025, 2:00 p.m. (CET)
Lecturer: Prof. Antonis Papachristodoulou, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Event language: English
Venue: Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control
Seminar room 2.255
Pfaffenwaldring 9
70569   Stuttgart
Campus Vaihingen
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Abstract

Intelligent, autonomous systems are increasingly prevalent in today's society and will continue to proliferate. Many of these systems are critical, necessitating rigorous safety guarantees. However, designing and verifying safe controllers remains challenging, even for systems with linear dynamics.

This talk will focus on the design of safe control systems using a Control Barrier Function (CBF) approach. I will first present a new convex design method for linear systems, enabling the co-design of the controller and the barrier function. I will then extend the analysis to more complex scenarios, including systems with nonlinear dynamics, constraints, high relative degree, and model uncertainty.

Finally, I will consider the case of multi-agent systems, proposing a novel distributed control algorithm with parallel computation for enhanced safety. Recognizing that computational limitations may necessitate early termination, I will present a probabilistic result for guaranteeing safety.

This work is a collaborative effort with Dr. Han Wang and Professor Kostas Margellos.

 

Biographical Information

Antonis Papachristodoulou is the Professor in Control Engineering at the University of Oxford, where he joined in 2006. He previously held a tutorial fellowship at Worcester College and served as the director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Synthetic Biology. He earned his MA/MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2000, and his PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, with a minor in Aeronautics in 2005. Professor Papachristodoulou's research contributions in robustness analysis, with applications to networked control systems and systems biology, have been recognized with the European Control Award in 2014. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has served on numerous technical program committees for major conferences. He also served as associate editor for Automatica and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

  

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