Cooperative control of robot swarms for large-scale energy system monitoring

Recent advances in computing, communication, and control techniques, as well as increasing computational power of embedded systems, provide a great opportunity to deploy networked intelligent robots in complex tasks for higher accuracy, safety and efficiency. However, current demonstrations of robot swarms are mainly restricted to controlled or structured environments, which significantly limits their deployment in complex real-world applications. The main challenge in designing practical cooperative robotic systems is to determine the individual agents’ controllers that enable the collective to achieve the desired global objectives. This talk will briefly introduce some pioneering works on swarm robotic control and its potential applications in large-scale energy system monitoring.