Monday, Decembr 14th 2015, Afternoon Session (2.00PM - 6.00 PM)
Rihga Royal Hotel Osaka, Osaka, Japan
Abstract
Interconnected systems have become the focus of intense investigation, primarily due to the promise of adaptability and scalability compared to single-agent solutions. As recent work has demon- strated, investigations are far-reaching across various disciplines, ranging from sampling, tracking, and coverage, mobility and topology control, to general agent agreement problems.
As a matter of fact, the study of interconnected systems is remarkably complex and highly susceptible to fragmen- tation especially due to the diversity of the research communities involved, ranging from computer science to control. Both a high level view of the fundamental topics that drive interconnected systems, and a fine-grained understanding of each topic is required to truly make progress in the field, and to provide an accessible starting point to new research. An effective approach to attain such goals would be to construct a taxonomy of interconnected systems. To this end, we have initiated a series of workshops, each addressing specific topics at the forefront of interconnected system research. For each of these topics, our goal is to identify those properties that underlie crucial, and yet common, aspects of theory and application. We believe that such a taxonomic approach may lead towards an understanding of the current open problems in each subarea, the relationships between subareas, ultimately yielding a roadmap for new researchers connecting the- ory and application.
This proposal represents a further step towards building such a taxonomy of interconnected systems after the first three workshops, the first held at IROS14 (http://asimov.usc.edu/~rkwillia/ws/iros14/), the second at ICRA15 (http: //asimov.usc.edu/~rkwillia/ws/icra15/), and the third at ACC15 (http://gasparri.dia.uniroma3.it/ ws/acc15/), focused on the implications of topology and asymmetry in collaborative systems. In this workshop, we will focus on the difficulties arising from partial and imperfect information in multi-agent networks. These challenging aspects represent an important area of focus for the control community, especially in recent years, in order to capture a more realistic modeling of interconnected systems. Indeed, typical modes of communication and sensing are often restrictive in their information content, e.g., partial field of view of sensor elements, corrupted or delayed communication, or anisotropic radiation of antennas. Our goal is to develop a taxonomy of con- trol methodologies used to address partial and imperfect information in multi-agent networks and identify the fundamental features and open problems in this challenging setting.
As our long-term vision for the series is to truly connect workshop topics, we will incorporate notions of asymmetry and topological control methodologies, to relate to the previous workshops in the series. Finally, we aim to build the series across the control and robotics communities, hopefully establishing a bridge between novelties in multi-agent theory and the future requirements of multi-robot applications.
Intended Audience
The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers in the field of multi-agent systems, with particular interest in the implications of partial and imperfect information in multi-agent networks, with expertise spanning network theory and control. We also hope to connect researchers in academia, government, and industry, with interest in beginning the journey towards methodically constructing a taxonomy of interconnected systems.