Workshop on Distributed Communication, Sensing, and Control The Workshop will be held in summer of 2007 on the Campus of Yale University

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The fields of cooperative and networked control are on the verge of a technological revolution. Emerging applications in national security, transportation, communication, and commerce require distributed networks to be capable of multi-user communication, collaborative signal and information processing, sensor fusion of multi-modal data, and, distributed computation, actuation, and control. These information rich applications place specific demands upon networks: the networks must scale gracefully to a large numbers of agents; the agents may be geographically distributed, often requiring communication over noisy, bandwidth-limited channels; the networks may consist of heterogeneous components, including embedded systems with limited computational power; and, the network's architecture may be decentralized, requiring local coordination amongst the agents. The workshop will bring together many junior and senior members of the research community to present new results and discuss many facets of distributed communication, sensing, and control systems which have been influenced by development of sensing and computing technologies. Intellectual Merit:: While significant research and development effort over the last decade in the individual fields of distributed communication, sensing and control has laid the initial ground- work for practical deployment, realization of such distributed sensing and control systems is still in its infancy. The principle challenges, from a systems-level perspective, arise due to the difficulty in realizing the objectives of inferencing and control tasks for a distributed dynamical environment through an underlying power/bandwidth constrained ad-hoc networked infrastructure. The main challenge can be summarized as follows: How to make decisions and determine control actions under uncertainty amongst a large numbers of communication constrained mobile agents that share spatially distributed dynamic information. Over the last few years there has been a significant interest in developing a general framework that combines issues of distributed sensing, communication and control. This kind of systems-level view is needed to get a qualitative understanding (e.g. scaling properties, robustness) as well as a quantitative synthesis of real systems that are capable of performing effective inferencing and control tasks under overall resource constraints. Although, the nature of the problem is such that it overlaps and intersects many traditional areas of systems theory (signal processing, decision and control, information theory), the problem of distributed sensing, communication, and control has been studied primarily within the context of these areas. BROADER IMPACTS: The proposed workshop will bring together researchers studying informational and mathematical aspects of distributed sensing and control. The workshop will facilitate this collaboration. The workshop will bring together internationally reputed researchers from different communities but focused on the common theme of distributed sensing, communication, and control over networks. On account of the contemporaneous nature of the topic, there will significant interest in this workshop. The results of the workshop will be published in IEEE Control Systems magazine.