Abstract: While autonomous systems that perform solo missions can yield significant benefits, greater efficiency and operational capability will be realized from teams of autonomous systems operating in a coordinated fashion. Potential applications for networked multiple autonomous systems include environmental monitoring, search and rescue, space-based interferometers, hazardous material handling, and combat, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Networked multi-agent systems place high demands on features such as low cost, high adaptivity and scalability, increased flexibility, great robustness, and easy maintenance. To meet these demands, the current trend is to design distributed algorithms that rely on only local information and local interaction to achieve global group behavior.

Biosketch: Wei Ren is currently a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2004. From 2004 to 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park. He was an Assistant Professor (2005-2010) and an Associate Professor (2010-2011) with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Utah State University. His research focuses on distributed control of multi-agent systems, networked cyber-physical systems, and autonomous systems. Dr. Ren is an author of two books Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks (Springer-Verlag, 2011) and Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control (Springer-Verlag, 2008). He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for Automatica, Systems and Control Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow.