Intelligent Agents for Disaster Management

ALADDIN [1] is a multi-disciplinary project that is developing novel techniques, architectures, and mechanisms for multi-agent systems in uncertain and dynamic environments. The application focus of the project is disaster management. Research within a number of themes is being pursued and this is considering different aspects of the interaction between autonomous agents and the decentralised system architectures that support those interactions. The aim of the research is to contribute to building more robust multi-agent systems for future applications in disaster management and other similar domains

LQG Control and Sensing Co-Design

We investigate a Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control and sensing co-design problem, where one jointly designs sensing and control policies. We focus on the realistic case where the sensing design is selected among a finite set of available sensors, where each sensor is associated with a different cost (e.g., power consumption). We consider two dual problem instances: sensing-constrained LQG control, where one maximizes control performance subject to a sensor cost budget, and minimum-sensing LQG control, where one minimizes sensor cost subject to performance constraints. We prove no polynomial time algorithm guarantees across all problem instances a constant approximation factor from the optimal. Nonetheless, we present the first polynomial time algorithms with per-instance suboptimality guarantees. To this end, we leverage a separation principle, that partially decouples the design of sensing and control. Then, we frame LQG co-design as the optimization of approximately supermodular set functions; we develop novel algorithms to solve the problems; and we prove original results on the performance of the algorithms, and establish connections between their suboptimality and control-theoretic quantities. We conclude the paper by discussing two applications, namely, sensing-constrained formation control and resource-constrained robot navigation.Comment: Accepted to IEEE TAC. Includes contributions to submodular function optimization literature, and extends conference paper arXiv:1709.0882

Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances

This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and Wireless Energy Transfer