Distributed Networked Sensing and Control Systems: Robust Estimation and Real-time Control

Distributed Networked Sensing and Control Systems: Robust Estimation and Real-time Control by Songhwai Oh Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering-Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Professor Shankar Sastry, Chair There is a growing interest in distributed networked sensing and control systems, such as wireless sensor networks, networked control systems, distributed control systems, multiagent systems, and heterogeneous sensor networks. A distributed networked sensing and control system consists of a number of autonomous agents. Information among these agents is usually shared by wireless communication. However, each agent is resource-constrained, e.g., it may have limited processing power, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth. These constraints create measurement inconsistency and communication unreliability and they are the major obstacles in realizing an autonomous distributed networked sensing and control system which is capable of real-time situation understanding and control. In this thesis, we take an advantage of spatio-temporal correlation among the neighboring agents and develop robust real-time algorithms for situation understanding and control. We also design and implement a real-time situation understanding and control system using wireless sensor networks. For this purpose, we use the mathematical frameworks of multi-target tracking and pursuit evasion games. Multi-target tracking is a general framework which can be used