This page contains information about various upcoming events that are of interest to the group. __NOTOC__
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* [http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/calendar.html Richard's calendar (travel)]
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* [[Group Schedule, Spring 2012]]
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The schedule for group and subgroup meetings is given below. Everyone should sign up for times to talk in the subgroup meetings.

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=== Week 1: 18-22 June ===

'''Biocircuits: 21 Jun (Thu), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* SURF introductions (40 min)
* Ophelia (20-30 min)
* Shaunak K (10-15 min)
* Lab updates

'''Group meeting: 21 Jun (Thu), 12-1'''
* Richard (research overview)

'''NCS/Robotics: 21 Jun (Thu), 4-6 pm'''
* SURF introductions (20 min)
* Eric (15-20 min)
* Clemens (15-20 min)
* Project updates

<hr>
* Richard out of town Mon-Tue
* SURF students start on Tue
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=== Week 2: 25-29 June ===
* American Control Conference (Montreal)
* Richard out of town all week
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=== Week 3: 2-6 July ===
* Richard out of town all week
* Institute holiday on Wed
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=== Week 4: 9-13 July ===
'''Biocircuits: 10 Jul (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Meeting may shift to Mon, 10a-12p
* Victoria (25-30 min)
* Anu (10-15 min)
* Jongmin (10-15 min)
* Instrument: Microscope/CellASIC
* Lab updates

'''Group meeting: 13 Jul (Fri), 12-1:15'''
* Tim Sullivan (Owhadi group)

'''NCS/Robotics: 13 Jul (Fri), 1:15-3 pm'''
* Stephanie (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

<hr>
* Richard out of town Tue pm - Thu (Living Foundries PI meeting)
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=== Week 5: 16-20 July ===
'''Biocircuits: 17 Jul (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Anu (30-40 min)
* Zach (10-15 min)
* SURF: Vinay V (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* Instrument: Computing
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 18 Jul (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Mumu (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 19 Jul (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Chin-Lin Guo (BE)
<hr>
* Shaunak K SURF presentation
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=== Week 6: 23-27 July ===
'''Biocircuits: 24 Jul (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Emzo (30-40 min)
* Enoch (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* Instrument: FACSCalibur/Quanta
* Lab updates

'''Group meeting: 25 Jul (Wed), 12-1:15'''
* Clemens Wiltsche

'''NCS/Robotics: 25 Jul (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Pavithra (15-20 min)
* Clemens (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* Project updates
<hr>
* Richard out of town Thu-Fri
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=== Week 7: 30 July - 3 August ===
'''Biocircuits: 31 Jul (Tue), 12-1:30 pm'''
* Lunch meeting; may shift to Thu
* Research presentation (30-40 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* SURF update (10-15 min)
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 1 Aug (Wed), 12-1:30 pm'''
* Lunch meeting; may shift to Thu
* Eric (15-20 min)
* Ufuk (15-20 min)
* Project updates

<hr>
* KISS workshop; Richard unavailable
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=== Week 8: 6-10 August ===
'''Biocircuits: 7 Aug (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Dan (30-40 min)
* Victoria (10-15 min)
* Marcella (10-15 min)
* Instrument: Victor X3/BioTek H1MF
* Lab updates

'''Group meeting: 8 Aug (Wed), 12-1:15'''
* Open

'''NCS/Robotics: 8 Aug (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

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=== Week 9: 13-17 August ===
* Richard out all week
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=== Week 10: 20-24 August ===
'''Biocircuits: 22 Aug (Wed), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Research presentation [non-MPP] (30-40 min)
* Research presentation [non-MPP] (10-15 min)
* Research update [non-MPP] (10-15 min)
* Instrument: freezers/cold room
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 22 Aug (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 23 Aug (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Lea Goentoro (Bi)
<hr>
* MPP retreat, Sun-Tue
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=== Week 11: 27-31 August ===
'''Biocircuits: 28 Aug (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Jongmin (30-40 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Instruments: Nanodrop/electroporator
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 29 Aug (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Mumu (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 30 Aug (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Open
<hr>
* Richard out of town on Fri
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=== Week 12: 3-7 September ===
'''Biocircuits: 4 Sep (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Marcella (30-40 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Instrument: gel rigs/gel imager
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 5 Sep (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Necmiye (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 6 Sep (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Open
<hr>
* Institute holiday on Mon
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=== Week 13: 10-14 September ===
'''Biocircuits: 11 Sep (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Zach (30-40 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Research update (10-15 min)
* Instrument: PCR machines/centrifuges
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 12 Sep (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Ufuk (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 13 Sep (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Open
<hr>
* Richard out on Fri
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=== Week 14: 17-21 September ===
* Richard out all week
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=== Week 15: 24-28 September ===
'''Biocircuits: 25 Sep (Tue), 10 am - 12 pm'''
* Enoch (30-40 min)
* Emzo (10-15 min)
* Dan (10-15 min)
* Lab updates

'''NCS/Robotics: 26 Sep (Wed), 4-6 pm'''
* Stephanie (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Research update (15-20 min)
* Project updates

'''Group meeting: 26 Sep (Thu), 12-1:15'''
* Open
<hr>
* Richard out on Mon
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Group Schedule, Spring 2012

2012-05-23T02:34:28Z

Necmiye:

Prabir Barooah, May 2012

2012-05-06T22:56:21Z

Necmiye:

Prabir Barooah will be visiting Caltech on 10 May (Thu).

=== Agenda ===

* 10:30: Richard Murray, 109 Steele Lab
* 11:00: Seminar, Steele Lab library
* 12:00: Lunch with faculty: Richard + TBD
* 1:15: Necmiye
* 2:00: Open
* 2:45: Open
* 3:30: Open
* 4:15: Open
* 5:00: Done for the day

=== Abstract ===
<center>
'''Improving robot localization by using robot-to-robot relative measurements in cooperative multi-robot teams'''

Thursday, 10 May 2012 - 11:00am, 114 Steele Lab
</center>

Localization of robots without GPS (or intermittentGPS) is a capability that is required of autonomous robots in several application domains. These include under water, in urban canyons, with poor line of sight to satellites, with adversarial GPS jamming, etc.
Localization by integrating self-motion measurements from on-board sensors such as IMUs/cameras lead to large growth of estimation error. This limits how long a robot can operate effectively without GPS. In a team of collaborative robots, however, there is an opportunity to do better. A robot can occasionally measure another robot's relative pose/position/bearing, usually by using vision-based sensors. This information, when fused with self-motion measurements, can lead to location estimates that are substantially more accurate than what can be obtained with self-motion measurements alone.

In this talk we will describe a class of algorithms for fusing relative measurements to estimate the pose (position and orientation)
of robots in a collaborative team. Due to the unknown orientations that are to be estimated, the problem becomes an optimization problem over a Riemannian manifold. A least-squares and (approximate) maximum likelihood estimator are developed. The least-squares version can be made distributed: it requires limited communication between nearby robots, but no centralized data exchange is needed. In each case, a gradient descent on the manifold is used to compute the estimates. Much of the earlier work in collaborative pose estimation was limited to 2-D case, the formulation we adopt allows to handle 3-D scenario with no additional difficulty. As is often the case, a number of unanswered questions remain, some of which will be discussed.

=== Brief Bio ===

Prabir Barooah was born in Jorhat, Assam (India). He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1999 to 2002 he was a research engineer at United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, CT. He received the M. S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1999 and the B.Tech degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1996. Dr. Barooah is the winner of the NSF CAREER award (2010), General Chairs' Recognition Award for Interactive papers at the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2009), best paper award at the 2nd Int. Conf. on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing (2005), and NASA group achievement award (2003).

Necmiye:

=== Schedule ===
7 April (Thursday)
{{agenda begin}}
{{agenda item|9:30a|Open}}
{{agenda item|10:15a|Open}}
{{agenda item|11:00a|Seminar, Annenberg (TBD)}}
{{agenda item|12:00p|Lunch: TBD}}
{{agenda item|1:15p|Open}}
{{agenda item|2:00p|Necmiye}}
{{agenda item|3:15p|Open}}
{{agenda item|4:00p|Ufuk}}
{{agenda end}}

=== Seminar Information ===
<center>
Control with limited information 
Cedric Langbort, UIUC
</center>

The design and implementation of controllers for distributed networked systems bring forth a number of new issues related to (i) the absence of a globally known, trusted, model of the plant, (ii) self-interests of individual components/decision makers, which may find it in their own best interest to misreport observations or mis-implement a globally efficient control action, and (iii) the interplay between communication protocols and control systems.

All these effects, which are unique to distributed control scenarios, can loosely be thought of as limiting the information available to different parts of the system (including the control designer), but introduce this information loss in various and complementary ways.

In this talk, we consider simple models that address different aspects of control and control design under restricted information.

* First, we study the ``price of silence" in control design, a new metrics inspired by the notion of "price of anarchy" in network games. While the price of anarchy characterizes the loss of performance due to selfish (i.e. Nash equilibrium playing) decision making, the price of silence is aimed at measuring the best achievable closed-loop performance (compared to the optimum) when the various subsystems composing a plant do not share their model's information with each other, i.e. `remain' silent about their subsystems.

* Then, we consider networked control problems in which the observation channel between the plant and the controller is adversarial (in contrast with traditional models where it is assumed to be stochastically, but non-maliciously, dropping, modifying, or delaying packets). Such strategic channels . We study two different types of attacks, -- one occurring solely at the level of the communication protocol, the other at the physical level -- and compute saddle-node solutions for the resulting zero-sum game between controller and jammer.

Different parts of this talk are the result of joint work with J.Ch. Delvenne (UC Louvain), T. Tanaka, A. Gupta and T. Basar (UIUC), and F. Farokhi and K.H. Johansson (KTH Stockholm).

=== Speaker Bio ===
Cedric Langbort has been an Assistant Professor of Aerospace
Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Research Assistant
Professor with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, since 2006.

He received the Aerospace Engineering Degree, with highest honors, from the Ecole Nationale Sup\'erieure
de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace - Supaero (now ISAE),
Toulouse, France, in 1999, the Diplome
d'Etudes Approfondies in dynamical systems
from the Institut Non-Lineaire de Nice, Nice,
France, in 2000, and the Ph. D. in Theoretical
Mechanics from Cornell University in 2005.
From 2004 to 2006, he was a Postdoctoral
Scholar in the Center for the Mathematics
of Information at the California Institute of Technology.

His research interests include distributed, robust, and networked control. He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on ``Networked Systems" and an editor for the journal ``Optimal Control Applications and Methods" (OCAM).

SURF 2011: Implementation of Control Protocols for Camera Networks

2011-01-10T14:59:49Z

Necmiye:

'''2011 SURF Project Description'''
* Mentor: Richard Murray
* Co-Mentor: Necmiye Ozay

In a recent preprint [3], we proposed a method for distributed control protocol synthesis for smart camera networks where the goal is to guarantee that certain linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications related to a given surveillance task are met. We consider a hierarchical visual surveillance system that supplements a stationary camera network used for tracking with additional active cameras (either pan-tilt-zoom cameras or mobile robots with vision sensors). This is a hands-on project where the goal is to build a setup to implement such embedded controllers on a real camera network. Possible steps of the project are:

* To come up with a couple of simple surveillance/service scenarios that could potentially be implemented in a lab equipped with a tracking system.
* To abstract finite state automata that describe the dynamic motion model of the cameras/robots (e.g. using the discretization method proposed in [2]).
* To synthesize a control protocol that assigns targets to cameras or jobs to robots and that generates a high level motion plan using the method described in [3] with TuLiP ([1]). A tracking system is being installed in the robotics lab at CDS that can be used to obtain target tracks. The track information should be communicated to the controllers that implement the control protocol.
* To implement the controllers and test their performance.

'''Required Skills:''' To make decent progress over the summer, the student should have experience with Python, or otherwise has software engineering knowledge that suggests learning other languages, environments, etc. will not be difficult. For using the tracking system familiarity or willingness to learn ROS (http://www.ros.org/wiki/ ) is crucial. At least elementary experience of working in Unix-like environments would be very helpful.

'''References'''
# T. Wongpiromsarn, U. Topcu, N. Ozay, H. Xu, and R. M. Murray, TuLiP: a software toolbox for receding horizon temporal logic planning, International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, 2011 (to appear). code available at http://www.cds.caltech.edu/tulip/
# T. Wongpiromsarn, U. Topcu, and R. M. Murray, Receding Horizon Temporal Logic Planning, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2010 (submitted).
# N. Ozay, U. Topcu, T. Wongpiromsarn, and R. M. Murray, Distributed Synthesis of Control Protocols for Smart Camera Networks, (submitted). available from http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~utopcu/images//b/b6/OTWM-iccps11.pdf