• [2013-04-10]

  Consensus in nonlinear spaces

Speaker： Prof. Rodolphe Sepulchre 

Time：10:00 am

Date：April 16, 2013

Venue：Room 434, Mechanics Building 

Host: Prof. Zhisheng Duan

Abstract:

Consensus problems have attracted significant attention in the control community over the last decade. They act as a rich source of new mathematical problems pertaining to the growing field of cooperative and distributed control.

The talk will present recent results focusing on consensus problems whose underlying state-space is not a linear space, but instead a highly symmetric nonlinear space such as the circle and several other relevant generalizations. A geometric approach will be shown to highlight the connection between several fundamental models of consensus, synchronization, and coordination, to raise significant global convergence issues not captured by linear models, and to be relevant for a number of engineering applications, including the design of coordinated motions in the plane or in the three-dimensional space.

Biography:

Rodolphe Sepulchre received the engineering degree (1990) and the PhD degree (1994), both in mathematical engineering, from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He was a BAEF fellow in 1994 and held a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1994 to 1996. He was a research associate of the FNRS at the Université catholique de Louvain from 1995 to 1997. He moved in 1997 to the Université de Liège, where he is currently professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was department chair from 2009 to 2011. He held a visiting position at Princeton University in 2002-2003 and at the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2009-2010. Since October 2012, he holds a part-time position at INRIA Lille Europe as the director of the orchestron project.

His current research interests are in control and coordination problems on nonlinear spaces, optimization on manifolds, analysis and synthesis of networks of oscillators and rhythmic systems. He co-authored the monographs "Constructive Nonlinear Control" (Springer-Verla, 1997) and "Optimization on Matrix Manifolds" (Princeton University Press, 2008). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Systems and Control Letters and an Associate Editor for SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization, the Journal of Nonlinear Science, and Mathematics for Control, Signals, and Systems. In 2008, he was awarded the IEEE Control Systems Society Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize. He is an IEEE fellow and an IEEE CSS distinguished lecturer since 2010.