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Paulo Tabuada

Bio: Paulo Tabuada is an academic researcher from University of California, Los Angeles. The author has contributed to research in topics: Control system & Control theory. The author has an hindex of 60, co-authored 288 publications receiving 20444 citations. Previous affiliations of Paulo Tabuada include University of California, Berkeley & Instituto Superior Técnico.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a secure state estimation algorithm that uses a satisfiability modulo theory approach to harness the complexity of the secure state estimator and provide guarantees on the soundness and completeness of the algorithm.
Abstract: Secure state estimation is the problem of estimating the state of a dynamical system from a set of noisy and adversarially corrupted measurements. Intrinsically a combinatorial problem, secure state estimation has been traditionally addressed either by brute force search, suffering from scalability issues, or via convex relaxations, using algorithms that can terminate in polynomial time but are not necessarily sound. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that uses a satisfiability modulo theory approach to harness the complexity of secure state estimation. We leverage results from formal methods over real numbers to provide guarantees on the soundness and completeness of our algorithm. Moreover, we discuss its scalability properties, by providing upper bounds on the runtime performance. Numerical simulations support our arguments by showing an order of magnitude decrease in execution time with respect to alternative techniques. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by applying it to the problem of controlling an unmanned ground vehicle.

240 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that every incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control system is approximately equivalent (bisimilar) to a symbolic model, where the approximation error is a design parameter in the symbolic model and can be rendered as small as desired.
Abstract: Control systems are usually modeled by differential equations describing how physical phenomena can be influenced by certain control parameters or inputs. Although these models are very powerful when dealing with physical phenomena, they are less suitable to describe software and hardware interfacing the physical world. For this reason there is a growing interest in describing control systems through symbolic models that are abstract descriptions of the continuous dynamics, where each "symbol" corresponds to an "aggregate" of states in the continuous model. Since these symbolic models are of the same nature of the models used in computer science to describe software and hardware, they provide a unified language to study problems of control in which software and hardware interact with the physical world. Furthermore the use of symbolic models enables one to leverage techniques from supervisory control and algorithms from game theory for controller synthesis purposes. In this paper we show that every incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control system is approximately equivalent (bisimilar) to a symbolic model. The approximation error is a design parameter in the construction of the symbolic model and can be rendered as small as desired. Furthermore if the state space of the control system is bounded the obtained symbolic model is finite. For digital control systems, and under the stronger assumption of incremental input-to-state stability, symbolic models can be constructed through a suitable quantization of the inputs.

236 citations

Book ChapterDOI
15 Jul 2010
TL;DR: Pessoa is presented, a tool for the synthesis of correct-by-design embedded control software that relies on recent results on approximate abstractions of control systems to reduceThe synthesis of control software to the synthesisation of reactive controllers for finite-state models.
Abstract: In this paper we present Pessoa, a tool for the synthesis of correct-by-design embedded control software Pessoa relies on recent results on approximate abstractions of control systems to reduce the synthesis of control software to the synthesis of reactive controllers for finite-state models We describe the capabilities of Pessoa and illustrate them through an example.

169 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The main contribution is to show that incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control systems with disturbances admit symbolic models.
Abstract: Symbolic models are abstract descriptions of continuous systems in which symbols represent aggregates of continuous states In the last few years there has been a growing interest in the use of symbolic models as a tool for mitigating complexity in control design In fact, symbolic models enable the use of well-known algorithms in the context of supervisory control and algorithmic game theory for controller synthesis Since the 1990s many researchers faced the problem of identifying classes of dynamical and control systems that admit symbolic models In this paper we make further progress along this research line by focusing on control systems affected by disturbances Our main contribution is to show that incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control systems with disturbances admit symbolic models

160 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper introduces a self- triggered strategy based on performance levels described by a quadratic discounted cost and shows quantitatively that the proposed scheme can outperform conventional periodic time-triggered solutions.

159 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI

[...]

08 Dec 2001-BMJ
TL;DR: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one, which seems an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.
Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

33,785 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A Nyquist criterion is proved that uses the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian matrix to determine the effect of the communication topology on formation stability, and a method for decentralized information exchange between vehicles is proposed.
Abstract: We consider the problem of cooperation among a collection of vehicles performing a shared task using intervehicle communication to coordinate their actions. Tools from algebraic graph theory prove useful in modeling the communication network and relating its topology to formation stability. We prove a Nyquist criterion that uses the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian matrix to determine the effect of the communication topology on formation stability. We also propose a method for decentralized information exchange between vehicles. This approach realizes a dynamical system that supplies each vehicle with a common reference to be used for cooperative motion. We prove a separation principle that decomposes formation stability into two components: Stability of this is achieved information flow for the given graph and stability of an individual vehicle for the given controller. The information flow can thus be rendered highly robust to changes in the graph, enabling tight formation control despite limitations in intervehicle communication capability.

4,377 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This note investigates a simple event-triggered scheduler based on the paradigm that a real-time scheduler could be regarded as a feedback controller that decides which task is executed at any given instant and shows how it leads to guaranteed performance thus relaxing the more traditional periodic execution requirements.
Abstract: In this note, we revisit the problem of scheduling stabilizing control tasks on embedded processors. We start from the paradigm that a real-time scheduler could be regarded as a feedback controller that decides which task is executed at any given instant. This controller has for objective guaranteeing that (control unrelated) software tasks meet their deadlines and that stabilizing control tasks asymptotically stabilize the plant. We investigate a simple event-triggered scheduler based on this feedback paradigm and show how it leads to guaranteed performance thus relaxing the more traditional periodic execution requirements.

3,695 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
07 Aug 2002
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe decentralized control laws for the coordination of multiple vehicles performing spatially distributed tasks, which are based on a gradient descent scheme applied to a class of decentralized utility functions that encode optimal coverage and sensing policies.
Abstract: This paper describes decentralized control laws for the coordination of multiple vehicles performing spatially distributed tasks. The control laws are based on a gradient descent scheme applied to a class of decentralized utility functions that encode optimal coverage and sensing policies. These utility functions are studied in geographical optimization problems and they arise naturally in vector quantization and in sensor allocation tasks. The approach exploits the computational geometry of spatial structures such as Voronoi diagrams.

2,445 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for a class of utility functions which encode optimal coverage and sensing policies which are adaptive, distributed, asynchronous, and verifiably correct.
Abstract: This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehicle networks performing distributed sensing tasks where each vehicle plays the role of a mobile tunable sensor. The paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for a class of utility functions which encode optimal coverage and sensing policies. The resulting closed-loop behavior is adaptive, distributed, asynchronous, and verifiably correct.

2,198 citations