John Baillieul

Boston University | BU · Department of Mechanical Engineering

There is increasing interest in developing the theoretical foundations of networked control systems that illuminate how brain networks function so as to enable sensory perception, control of movement, memory and all the operations that are needed for animals to survive. The present paper proposes a biologically inspired network model featuring dyna...

We define the complexity of a continuous-time linear system to be the minimum number of bits required to describe its forward increments to a desired level of fidelity, and compute this quantity using the rate distortion function of a Gaussian source of uncertainty in those increments. The complexity of a linear system has relevance in control-comm...

Building on our recent research on neural heuristic quantization systems, results on learning quantized motions and resilience to channel dropouts are reported. We propose a general emulation problem consistent with the neuromimetic paradigm. This optimal quantization problem can be solved by model predictive control (MPC), but because the optimiza...

Based on our recent research on neural heuristic quantization systems, we propose an emulation problem consistent with the neuromimetic paradigm. This optimal quantization problem can be solved with model predictive control (MPC) by deriving the conditions under which the quantized system can guarantee (asymptotic) stability during emulation by opt...

Building on our recent work on {\em neuromimetic control theory}, new results on resilience and neuro-inspired quantization are reported. The term neuromimetic refers to the models having features that are characteristic of the neurobiology of biological motor control. As in previous work, the focus is on what we call {\em overcomplete} linear syst...

Drawing inspiration from biology, we describe the way in which visual sensing with a monocular camera can provide a reliable signal for navigation of mobile robots. The work takes inspiration from a classic paper by Lee and Reddish (Nature, 1981, https://doi.org/10.1038/293293a0) in which they outline a behavioral strategy pursued by diving sea bir...

Stylized models of the neurodynamics that underpin sensory motor control in animals are proposed and studied. The voluntary motions of animals are typically initiated by high level intentions created in the primary cortex through a combination of perceptions of the current state of the environment along with memories of past reactions to similar st...

Borrowing terminology from fluid mechanics, the concepts of {\em Eulerian} and {\em Lagrangian optical flow sensing} are introduced. Eulerian optical flow sensing assumes that each photoreceptor in the camera or eye can instantaneously detect feature image points and their velocities on the retina. If this assumption is satisfied, even a two pixel...

This paper discusses elements of a control theory of systems comprised of networks of simple agents that collectively achieve sensing and actuation goals despite having strictly limited capability when acting alone. The goal is to understand {\em neuromorphic} feedback control in which streams of data come from large arrays of sensors (e.g. photo-r...

This paper studies artistic expression in human movement by exploring the performance art form salsa. The motions of a salsa performance are constructed as concatenations of motion primitives, each of which specifies the movement of the dance pair over the course of eight musical beats. To analyze the syntax of artistic expression, the choreography...

fig orientation="portrait" position="float" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> In the years since the launch of the World Wide Web in 1993, there have been profoundly transformative changes to the entire concept of publishing—exceeding all the previous combined technical advances of the centu...

Corrective Transmission Switching can be used by the grid operator to relieve line overloading and voltage violations, improve system reliability, and reduce system losses. Power grid optimization by means of line switching is typically formulated as a mixed integer programming problem (MIP). Such problems are known to be computationally intractabl...

It is well known that the reserves/redundancies built into the transmission grid in order to address a variety of contingencies over a long planning horizon may, in the short run, cause economic dispatch inefficiency. Accordingly, power grid optimization by means of short term line switching has been proposed and is typically formulated as a mixed...

The way in which electric power depends on the topology of circuits with mixed voltage and current sources is examined. The power flowing in any steady-state DC circuit is shown to depend on a minimal set of key variables called fundamental node voltages and fundamental edge currents. Every steady-state DC circuit can be decomposed into a voltage c...

Flying animals accomplish high-speed navigation through fields of obstacles using a suite of sensory modalities that blend spatial memory with input from vision, tactile sensing, and, in the case of most bats and some other animals, echolocation. Although a good deal of previous research has been focused on the role of individual modes of sensing i...

This special issue brings together recent research on the efficient use of energy in commercial, residential, and other types of buildings and facilities.

Recent communication, computation, and technology advances coupled with climate change concerns have transformed the near future prospects of electricity transmission, and, more notably, distribution systems and microgrids. Distributed resources (wind and solar generation, combined heat and power) and flexible loads (storage, computing, EV, HVAC) m...

Well known in the theory of network flows, Braess paradox states that in a congested network, it may happen that adding a new path between destinations can increase the level of congestion. In transportation networks the phenomenon results from the decisions of network participants who selfishly seek to optimize their own performance metrics. In an...

Recent communication, computation, and technology advances coupled with climate change concerns have transformed the near future prospects of electricity transmission, and, more notably, distribution systems and microgrids. Distributed resources (wind and solar generation, combined heat and power) and flexible loads (storage, computing, EV, HVAC) m...

This study proposes a formal way of representing the dancers in a salsa performance as a transition system. The model involves two finite state machines that communicate through a channel and the goal is to understand the notion of optimality in salsa. This is achieved by integrating two complexity metrics that measure the energy and entropy of the...

This paper describes a new approach to model-ing consumers' utility preferences in price-controlled demand systems, such as the demand for mobile service or electric energy. Relaxing the assumption that the consumer group size is infinite and individual utility preferences are static, we explicitly model their dynamics through a non-uniform and tim...

As pointed out in Baillieul and Antsaklis (2007), in the three decades since re-searchers at Bosch GmbH launched the technology of networked control systems for automobiles, there has been an explosion of interest in both the theory and deployment of real-time networks of devices. This interest is especially apparent in much of the current research...

Animals within groups need to coordinate their reactions to perceived environmental features and to each other in order to safely move from one point to another. This paper extends our previously published work on the flight patterns of Myotis velifer that have been observed in a habitat near Johnson City, Texas. Each evening, these bats emerge fro...

The ability to rapidly focus attention and react to salient environmental features enables animals to move agiley through their habitats. To replicate this kind of high-performance control of movement in synthetic systems, we propose a new approach to feedback control that bases control actions on randomly perceived features. Connections will be ma...

We propose and solve a stochastic dynamic programming (DP) formulation of the optimal provision of regulation service reserves (RSR) by controlling dynamic demand preferences in smart buildings. A major contribution over past dynamic pricing work is that we pioneer the relaxation of static, uniformly distributed utility of demand. In this paper we...

Multi-agent systems are encountered in nature (animal groups) in various domains of technology (multi-robot networks, mixed robot-human teams) and in various human activities (such as dance and team athletics). Information exchange among agents ranges from being incidentally important to crucial in such systems. Several systems in which information...

This chapter summarizes work to understand various aspects of the communication that occurs through the movements of partners in a dance. The first part of the paper adopts the terminology of motion description languages and deconstructs an elementary form of the well-known popular dance, salsa, in terms of four motion primitives (dance steps). The...

Inspired by the success of packet switched data transfer that improves the fairness and efficiency in com-munication networks, this paper proposes a novel concept of packetized energy that is capable of improving the performance of the smart grid in providing demand response. Here the term packetized refers to a temporal quantization into fixed len...

Demand side management has gained increasing importance as the penetration of renewable energy grows. Based on a Markov jump process model of a group of thermostatic loads, this paper proposes a two level feedback system to govern the interactions between an independent system operator (ISO) and a number of regulation reserve providers such that tw...

Animals within groups need to coordinate their reactions to perceived environmental features and to each other in order to safely move from one point to another. This paper extends our previously published work on the flight patterns of Myotis velifer that have been observed in a habitat near Johnson City, Texas. Each evening, these bats emerge fro...

The movements of birds, bats, and other flying species are governed by complex sensorimotor systems that allow the animals to react to stationary environmental features as well as to wind disturbances, other animals in nearby airspace, and a wide variety of unexpected challenges. The paper and talk will describe research that analyzes the three-dim...

Demand side management has gained increasing importance as the penetration of renewable energy grows. Based on a Markov jump process modelling of a group of thermostatic loads, this paper proposes a two level feedback system design between the independent system operator (ISO) and the regulation service provider such that two objectives are achieve...

Electricity peaks can be harmful to grid stability and result in additional generation costs to balance supply with demand. By developing a network of smart appliances together with a quasi-decentralized control protocol, direct load control (DLC) provides an opportunity to reduce peak consumption by directly controlling the on/off switch of the ne...

There is evidence that flying animals such as pigeons, goshawks, and bats use optical flow sensing to enable high-speed flight through forest clutter. This paper discusses the elements of a theory of controlled flight through obstacle fields in which motion control laws are based on optical flow sensing. Performance comparison is made with feedback...

Problems of efficient communication by means of the motions of a controlled dynamical system are considered. Application settings in which such problems are of interest include quantum computing and problems of two or more robotic agents communicating with each other by means of their motions, but in the present paper, we restrict our attention to...

Recent papers have treated {\em control communication complexity} in the context of information-based, multiple agent control systems including nonlinear systems of the type that have been studied in connection with quantum information processing. The present paper continues this line of investigation into a class of two-agent distributed control s...

Interest in networked control systems has grown rapidly. In some remotely time critical control applications, multiple sensors and actuators are connected to controllers via a shared wireless network. Feedback and control information is transmitted over the network, and the time critical data traffic can tolerate only low bit error probability and...

Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert the chemical energy of a gaseous fuel directly into electricity. They are widely regarded as potential future stationary and mobile power sources. The response of a fuel cell system depends on the air ...

The paper describes results on two components of a research program focused on motion-based communication mediated by the dynamics of a control system. Specifically we are interested in how mobile agents engaged in a shared activity such as dance can use motion as a medium for transmitting certain types of messages. The first part of the paper adop...

In this paper, we present two motion primitives that allow a mobile sensor to explore the features of an unknown scalar field. The first motion primitive is designed to follow and to map level contours (contours with constant value of the field). The second one steers the sensor to ascend or alternatively descend the field gradient and, as a result...

Research into several aspects of robot-enabled reconnaissance of random fields is reported. The work has two major components: the underlying theory of information acquisition in the exploration of unknown fields and the results of experiments on how humans use sensor-equipped robots to perform a simulated reconnaissance exercise. The theoretical f...

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) publishing has seen enormous changes over the last two decades. Although manuscripts are now circulated electronically for peer review, most journals that cover fields related to automatic control and optimization continue to have review times that require six months or longer to complete a r...

It is our great pleasure to hold a plenary panel session at ASCC 2011. The theme of the panel is Trend in Control System Design and Applications. We are honored that Professor Li-Chen Fu, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Journal of Control will chair this panel and five distinguished control professors will join this panel and share their visions and exper...

Using reactive control algorithms and a dictionary of motion primitives, we have developed search and reconnaissance protocols for mobile robots aimed at efficiently discovering key features of an unknown potential field's topology (as opposed to its geometry). This work has in a natural way led to the creation of parsimonious reconnaissance routin...

This paper presents new results on the behaviour of an n-link pendulum which is controlled by means of an oscillatory input forcing one end link. Drawing on recent research on the oscillatory control of second order non-linear systems, we adopt the averaged potential as the primary tool in our equilibrium and stability analysis. While such control...

There is increasing interest in having mixed teams of humans and smart machines carry out missions of search, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Understanding the way humans make decisions in such search problems is important to achieve effective cooperation. We report research on search styles we have observed in one dimensional search for real roo...

Recent papers have treated control communication complexity in the context of information-based, multiple agent control systems including nonlinear systems of the type that have been studied in connection with quantum information processing. The present paper continues this line of investigation into a class of two-agent distributed control systems...

An information-like metric that characterizes the complexity of functions on compact planar domains is presented. Combined with some recently introduced control laws for level following and gradient climbing, it is shown how the metric can be used in designing reconnaissance strategies for sensor-enabled mobile robots. Reconnaissance of unknown sca...

The General Co-Chairs welcome you to Shanghai and the joint IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and the Chinese Control Conference (CCC). It is the 48-th consecutive CDC and the 28-th CCC. Since 1986, the annual CDC has been held outside the United States with increasing frequency, and this year it is being held in the western Pacific for...

The objective of the standard parts optimal control problem is to find a number, m, of control inputs to a given input-output system that can be used in different combinations to achieve a certain number, n, of output objectives and to do this in such a way that a specified figure-of-merit measuring the average cost of control is minimized. The pro...

A formal notion of gesturing defined as the modulation of relative separation between mobile robots has been explored in. We extend this work by developing a peer-to-peer communication channel and an associated distributed communication protocol based exclusively on the modulation of relative motion and its observation. Protocols that enable two un...

We present a formal protocol for communication based on modulating the relative motion between mobile agents. This type of communication is typically dependent on context in that a particular motion or gesture will indicate something related to the current activity. The focus of this article is on enabling such motion-based signaling between non-ho...

The IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) will be held December 16-19, 2009, in conjunction with the Chinese Control Conference (CCC) in the historically important Chinese city of commerce, Shanghai.

The interaction of information and control has been a topic of interest to system theorists that can be traced back at least to the 1950’s when the fields of communications, control, and information theory were new but developing rapidly. Recent advances in our understanding of this interplay have emerged from work on the dynamical effect of state...

Gesturing is one of the most prevalent means of communication in the world around us. In this article, we describe a way to mimic this notion of gesturing to the signaling between mobile robots. One can decompose this mode of signaling into two parts. The first is the ability of the gestu ring agent to generate a gesture as a motion. The other part...

Japan has become a world leader in humanoid robotics, and every year, international conferences like SICE feature reports of remarkable new suites of human behaviors that have been convincingly simulated by machines. But as machines everywhere have become more capable of autonomous operation, there is an increasing awareness that the psychological...

In this paper, we present a reactive control law that can navigate a single, sensor-enabled vehicle to ascend or descend a scalar potential field. The design builds on our previous work on developing an online following control. The model framework enables us to establish performance bounds for the developed ascending/descending control that are re...

This paper reports a tight bound on the data capacity a feedback channel must provide in order to stabilize a right half-plane pole of a linear, time-invariant control system. The proof is constructive, and involves considering a general class of quantized control realizations of classical feedback designs. Even for the coarsest quantizations—with...

A scheme for tracking nano-sized magnetic particles using a magnetic force microscope (MFM) is introduced. The stray magnetic field of the particle induces a shift in the phase of the oscillation of the MFM tip. The magnitude of this shift depends on the distance between the tip and the particle and can be expressed as a spatial field. We present a...

Graphical methods for the design and analysis of distributed control laws for multiagent robot formations have been proposed by many researchers. This paper extends recent results on the rigidity theory of directed graphs that have been developed to characterize feedback patterns used in a class of formation control problems. While the theory arise...

The dynamics of exploration vs exploitation decisions are explored in the context of robotic search problems. Building on prior work on robotic search together with our own work on reactive control laws for potential field mapping, we propose a new set of search protocols for teams of sensor-enabled mobile robots. The focus is on collaborative stra...

A standard paradigm in control theory involves the use of feedback to change the dynamics of a system in some significant way. In the language of Willems ([9]), this paradigm prescribes the use of feedback to create desirable “behavior” in the system. There is growing interest (see e.g. [8]) in exploring an alternative paradigm applied to the contr...

In this paper we propose a control law aimed at tracing level curves (isolines) in a scalar potential field. An exploration agent governed by such a law can map simply connected regions in space where the potential field exceeds a predefined threshold. The distinguishing feature of our control is that it does not rely on higher order characteristic...

Recently, we reported results on coding strategies for scalar feedback systems with data-rate-limited feedback channels in which the data-rate constraints are time varying. Such rate-varying channels are typically encountered in communication networks in which links between nodes are subject to noise, congestion, and intermittent disruption. The pr...

This special issue provides information on current and future research directions in the emerging field of networked control systems. The first paper provides a comprehensive overview of the field. The remaining 11 papers are organized in three sections: a section on the "current state of the technology of networked control systems"; a section on f...

A current survey of the emerging field of networked control systems is provided. The aim is to introduce the fundamental issues involved in designing successful networked control systems, to provide a snapshot assessment of the current state of research in the field, to suggest useful future research directions, and to provide a broad perspective o...

While classical models of risk in insurance and financial markets have been effectively treated by the methods of stochastic and adaptive processes, a wide variety of new technologies will require qualitatively different methods which emphasize risk due to constraints on spatial and temporal distribution of information, risk due to scale, and risk...

This paper considers a simple decentralized control law which stabilizes rigid formations of point robots in a way that is consistent with recent work B.D.O. Anderson and a number of others. The feedback law is simple in that it is shown to make parsimonious use of feedback information in a sense that will be made precise, and it is also simple in...

This paper considers the time-invariant, memorylessly quantized control of scalar plants over erroneous binary channels. As bit errors cannot be compensated for, plant stability is impossible. Thus, the simplest feasible objective is to ensure that the closed-loop is in some sense well-behaved for as long as possible. In this paper, a definition of...