Cooperative control of robot swarms for largescale energy system monitoring

Junyan Hu, DEI Fellow & Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, Durham University

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.

Junyan is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science at Durham University and a Fellow of Durham Energy Institute. Before joining Durham University, he was a Lecturer at University College London and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester. His research interests include swarm intelligence, multi-agent systems, cooperative path planning, robust/adaptive control, with applications to autonomous vehicles and intelligent robotics. Junyan is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Fellow of Higher Education Academy. He serves as an Associate Editor for leading international journals and conferences in the field of robotics and control, e.g., IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), and IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA).