Francesco Bullo Associate Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation College of Engineering University of California at Santa Barbara

Research
Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems, by F. Bullo and A. D. Lewis, Texts in Applied Mathematics, Springer Verlag, 2004, ISBN 0-387-22195-6.
Index of Papers: an updated list of papers and technical reports, including:

• Sara Susca: Monitoring environmental boundaries with a robotic sensor network and Synchronization of beads on a ring
• Stephen Smith: Monotonic target assignment for robotic networks (Best Student Paper Award Finalist, CDC'07)
• Anurag Ganguli: Distributed deployment of asynchronous guards in art galleries (Best Student Paper Award, ACC'06)
• Ketan Savla: On traveling salesperson problems for Dubins' vehicle (Best Student Paper Award Finalist, CDC-ECC'05)
• On collective motion in sensor networks: sample problems and distributed algorithms

• Stephen L. Smith "Task allocation for robotic networks" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, stephen at engr.ucsb.edu)
• Karl J. Obermeyer "Visibility problems for sensor networks and UAVs" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, karl at umail.ucsb.edu)
• Shaunak D. Bopardikar "Cooperative pursuit strategies" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, bshaunak at umail.ucsb.edu)
• Joey Durham "Robotic network testbed for localization and mapping" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, joey at engineering.ucsb.edu)
• Sandra Dandach "Distributed decision making" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, sandra at engineering.ucsb.edu)
• Fabio Pasqualetti "Intrusion detection" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB, fabiopass at gmail.com)
• Giulia Piovan "Network localization" (visiting Laurea student, ECE Universita' di Padova, gpiovan at umail.ucsb.edu)
• Fabio Morbidi "Multi-vehicle visibility via controlled invariance" (visiting PhD student, ECE Universita' di Siena, morbidi at dii.unisi.it)
• Nathan Owen "Cooperative decision making in mixed networks" (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB)
• Vaibhav Srivastava (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB)
• Anahita Tabatabaei (Ph.D. student, ME UCSB)
• Paolo Frasca "Cooperative deployment with information constraints" (visiting PhD student, Math Politecnico di Torino, paolo.frasca at polito.it)

Special issue of SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization Control and Optimization in Cooperative Networks (OLD Submission: 1 November 2006) NEW Submission DEADLINE: 31 December 2006 Special Issue: Tentatively November 2007/January 2008

• IEEE Conference in Decision and Control (CDC'08), December 9-11, 2008, Cancun, Mexico
• American Control Conference (ACC'08), Jun 11-13, 2008, Seattle, Washington, USA
• 3rd Workshop on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Methods for Nonlinear Control (LHMNLC'06), July 19-21, 2006, Nagoya, Japan
• NSF Workshop: Future Directions in Systems Research for Networked Sensing, May 25-26, Boston, MA
• Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, Mar 29-31, 2006, Santa Barbara, California
  Slides: Coordination in Multi-Agent Networks
• Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control, Mar 13-15, 2006, Heeze, The Netherlands
  Slides: Coordination in Multi-Agent and Visually-Guided Agent Networks
• IPAM Workshop on "Swarming by Nature and by Design", Feb 27 - Mar 3, 2006, University of California at Los Angeles, CA
• Summer School on Modelling and Control of Complex Dynamical Systems, Jul 18-23, 2005, Bertinoro, Italia
• Minisymposia on Distributed motion coordination, at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, May 22-26, 2005, Snowbird, Utah
• Workshop on Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems at the 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Dec 2004, Bahamas
  Slides: Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems
• Block Island Workshop on Cooperative Control, Jun 2003, Block Island, RI
  Slides: Nonsmooth Coordination Algorithms
• 2nd IFAC Workshop on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Methods for Nonlinear Control (LHMNLC'03), April 2003, Seville, Spain
  Slides: Modeling and Trajectory Design for Mechanical Control Systems

Bio
Francesco Bullo received the Laurea degree "summa cum laude" in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1999. From 1998 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His research interests include motion coordination for multi-agent networks, motion planning for autonomous vehicles, and geometric control of mechanical systems. He is a recipient of the 2003 ONR Young Investigator Award. He is the coauthor (with Andrew D. Lewis) of the book "Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems" (New York: Springer Verlag, 2004, 0-387-22195-6). His students' papers were finalists for the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2002, 2005, 2007), and the American Control Conference (2005, 2006). He has published more than 100 papers in international journals, books, and refereed conferences. He serves on the Editorial Board of the "IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control" and of the "SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization."

Detailed CV.

What is Motion Coordination?

• Take a look at these slides (last revision, March 31, 2006).
• Read an accessible introduction that we prepared for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine (last revision, April 9, 2006 -- but based on ideas developed in 2001-2004 timeframe).
• Read a second shorter overview that was presented at IEEE CDC 2005.
• Our most cited work is on coverage control. The example of the distributed art gallery deployment problem is discussed here.
• In two detailed articles we provide a formal description of a vast class of motion coordination models, problems and algorithms. Synchronous robotic networks: Models and complexity and algorithms and analysis.

My articles on google scholar
bullo at engineering dot ucsb dot edu