Ensemble Control: steering a continuum between configurations

In this talk I will provide a brief introduction to ensemble control theory, which is a new and useful way to deal with bounded uncertainty in dynamical systems. To steer one system with an uncertain parameter, we pretend to steer a continuous ensemble of systems, each with a particular value of that parameter. Despite the corresponding jump from a finite-dimensional to an infinite-dimensional configuration space, I will show how to establish controllability results and to derive practical motion planning algorithms based on these results. Hardware experiments will demonstrate the utility of this approach when applied to real robots.