CKSRI Seminar Series 2024 “Glocal (Global/Local) Control for Networked Dynamical Systems with Physical Interactions: from Theory to Practice"

Thank you to everyone who joined the CKSRI Seminar!
We are honoured to have invited Prof. Shinji Hara, Professor Emeritus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, as our distinguished speaker. 

ABSTRACT:
This seminar has invited Prof. Shinji Hara, Professor Emeritus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, to discuss control for networked dynamical systems with physical interactions. There are a variety of networked dynamical systems with hierarchical structure, which may include a group of mobile robots or drones. 
 

The purpose of control is to achieve desired cooperative tasks in addition to guaranteeing the stability of the network system by compensating physical interactions among the agents and with environments.  One of the ideas to handle such systems is "Glocal (Global/Local) Control," meaning that the global objective is achieved mainly by local actions of sensing and control in a cooperative manner. This new framework was proposed for controlling networked dynamical systems, where one of the most important issues is how to compromise the global and local control objectives.
 

The main purposes of this talk are to explain several new ideas by exploiting the special structure of the target networked systems and to provide new control theories by utilization of powerful existing theories in classical, modern, and robust control. These enable us to develop scalable methods of control analysis and design.  The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified through practical applications of a type of electric vehicle with multiple locally controlled wheels and cooperative decentralized control for group drones. 

SHORT BIO:
Shinji Hara received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1974, 1976, and 1981, respectively. In 1984, he joined Tokyo Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor and served as a Full Professor for ten years. From 2002 to 2017 he was a Full Professor in the Department of Information Physics and Computing at the University of Tokyo. He is Professor Emeritus of Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo. His current research interests are in robust control, decentralized cooperative control for large-scale networked dynamical systems, system biology, and glocal control.
 

Dr. Hara has received many awards in control including the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control System Society in 2006. He was the President of SICE (Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, Japan) in 2009, a Vice President of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2009 to 2010, and an IFAC Council member from 2011 to 2017. He is a Fellow of IFAC, IEEE, and SICE.