Abstract:  Distributed cooperative systems exist in our everyday life. Examples include power grids, communication networks, transportation systems, supply chains and water distribution networks. They are complicated and pose significant challenges to our existing design theory. To tackle the complexity, we devote ourselves to cross-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of control, communication, learning and verification. In particular, we focus on a formal design of multi-robot systems at the Discover Lab Notre Dame. Our objective is to obtain formal guarantees on the accomplishment of high-level team missions through automatic synthesis of local coordination mechanisms and control laws. Our basic idea is to decompose the team mission into individual subtasks such that the design can be reduced to local synthesis problems for individual robots, and then solving these local synthesis problems by composing predesigned and verified reactive motion/action primitives of robots. The developed theory will enable robots in the team to cooperatively learn their individual roles in a mission, and then automatically synthesize local task and mission plans to fulfill their subtasks. An automated warehouse example will be used to illustrate our proposed design methods. A salient feature of the method lies on its ability to handle environmental uncertainties and un-modeled dynamics, as we do not require an explicit model of the transition dynamics of each agent and their interactions with the environment. In addition, the design is on-line and reactive enabling the robot team to adapt to changing environments and dynamic tasking. 

Bio-sketch: Hai Lin is currently an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, where he got his Ph.D. in 2005. Before returning to his alma mater, Hai has been working as an assistant professor in the National University of Singapore from 2006 to 2011. Dr. Lin's teaching and research interests are in the multidisciplinary study of the problems at the intersections of control, communication, computation, machine learning and computational verification. His current research thrust is on cyber-physical systems, multi-robot cooperative tasking, and human-machine collaboration. Hai has been served in several committees and editorial board, including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is currently serving as the Chair for the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems. He served as the Program Chair for IEEE ICCA 2011, IEEE CIS 2011 and the Chair for IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Singapore Chapter for 2009 and 2010. He is a senior member of IEEE and a recipient of 2013 NSF CAREER award.