2/6/2015 William Gillespie
Written by William Gillespie
Professor Alex Olshevsky has received an award from the Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) for “Reliable Multi-Agent Control in Failure-Prone Environments via Inhomogeneous Markov Chains.” Olshevsky is one of five University of Illinois scientists receiving the 57 awards granted this year. The YIP is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who received PhD or equivalent degrees in the last five years and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators.
Olshevsky explains, "The project is about developing optimization protocols which are robust enough to be run in distributed systems with frequent failures. As a concrete example, consider designing a protocol for a group of UAVs to stay in a desired formation, maintaining prescribed distances from each other, even though some of the UAVs become damaged and start deviating arbitrarily from the assigned protocol. The goal of the project is to develop distributed algorithms which still perform reliably even in the face of such 'adversarial' disruptions."