The recent trend in cooperative control design is a biologically motivated approach, drawing from ideas and observations of animal group behaviors, which suggest the absence of central coordination and rather the emergence of aggregate group behavior as a result of individual actions. Flocking, schooling and swarming can be shown analytically to be asymptotically stable behaviors in multi-agent systems with nearest neighbor interactions. Starting from some earlier work along these lines, the presentation leads to current work on control design for a new generation of biologically inspired mobile robots to be used by the US Army for urban reconnaissance and surveillance.

Short bio: Dr. Tanner received his Eng. Diploma and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. From 2001 to 2003 he was a post doctoral fellow with the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). From 2003 to 2005 he was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico, and he held a secondary appointment with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UNM. He is a recipient of an NSF Early Faculty Career Award (2005). His research focuses on planning and control for multi-agent robotic systems. His research interests include cooperative planning and control of networked mobile robots, modeling and abstraction of hybrid systems, coordination of mobile sensor and actuation networks, and nonholonomic motion planning and control. Dr. Tanner is a member of the ASME, and IEEE's Control Systems and Robotics & Automation Societies. Within ASME he serves as a Member of the Technical Committee on Robotics. Within IEEE, he is a member of the Robotics and Automation Society's Financial Activities Board, and a Steering Committee member for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. In addition, he serves on the IFAC Technical Committee on Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Automation Science and Engineering, and has served in the Conference Editorial Boards of the Control Systems and Robotics and Automation Societies.