Nikhil Chopra

 Coordinated Science Laboratory

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

nchopra at uiuc dot edu

I have recently moved to University of Maryland, College Park. My new webpage can be found here http://www.enme.umd.edu/facstaff/fac-profiles/chopra.html. Formerly, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Coordinated Science Laboratory in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Professor Mark Spong. I completed my Ph.D. in Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering in October, 2006 under the guidance of Professor Spong. My research goal is to develop fundamental understanding of synchronization and control of networked dynamical systems interacting over unreliable communication networks. This work is important in numerous practical applications, such as sensor networks, unmanned air vehicles, and robot networks. As part of my research efforts, I plan to use the paradigm of  passivity-based control to study synchronization and control of semi-autonomous telerobotic networks, develop strategies for distributed sensing, estimation and control of robot networks and coverage control by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). I am also interested in investigating the synchronization phenomena in networks of biological oscillators, such as the Kuramoto model.  I have earlier  successfully applied this approach to solve synchronization and coordination problems in bilateral teleoperation, multi-robot networks, and the exponential synchronization problem in Kuramoto oscillators.