Roberto Tron receives 2012 Best Student Paper Award

Roberto Tron, Ph.D. graduate from the JHU Center for Imaging Science (“CIS”) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the 2012 Best Student Paper Award from the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (“IEEE”) Control System Society. The award was presented in December 2012 at IEEE’s 51st Conference on Decision and Control (“CDC”). According to IEEE’s website, the purpose of the award is “to recognize excellence in a conference paper whose primary author is a student member of the IEEE” with a basis on “originality, clarity, and potential impact on practical applications or theoretical foundations of control.” In addition to receiving an award certificate, Roberto received travel expenses to attend the CDC conference in Maui, Hawaii and a complimentary conference registration.

Roberto’s paper titled “Intrinsic Consensus on SO(3) with Almost-Global Convergence” was co-authored with Bijan Afsari, Ph.D., CIS Postdoctoral Fellow, and René Vidal, Ph.D., BME CIS Associate Professor. As reported in the abstract, the authors state that “In this paper we propose a discrete time protocol to align the states of a network of agents evolving in the space of rotations SO(3). The starting point of our work is Riemannian consensus, a general and intrinsic extension of classical consensus algorithms to Riemannian manifolds. Unfortunately, this algorithm is guaranteed to align the states only when the initial states are not too far apart. We show how to modify this algorithm so that the states of the agents can be aligned, in practice, from almost any initial condition. While we focus on the specific case of SO(3), we hope that this work will represent the first step toward more general results.”