Frontiers in Systems and Control
|
Abstract of the workshop: This special workshop “Frontiers in Systems and Control” consists of a series of presentations given by renowned researchers in systems and control. Speakers have been playing important roles for the leadership in IEEE Control Systems Society. This workshop will be a great opportunity for researchers in academia and industry as well as graduate students to interact with world-leading experts and to hear about current research trends and stories in control theory and applications. |
Agenda
| Time | Contents |
| 12-12:50pm | Buffet lunch |
| 12:55-1pm | Opening and welcome (Ryozo Nagamune, UBC) |
| 1-1:20pm | Talk by Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, University of California, Irvine |
| 1:20-1:40pm | Talk by Dr. Antonella Ferrara, University of Pavia, Italy |
| 1:40-2pm | Talk by Dr. Mario di Bernardo, University of Naples Federico II, Italy |
| 2-2:30pm | Coffee break & Poster session |
| 2:30-2:50pm | Talk by Dr. Ian Petersen, Australian National University |
| 2:50-3:10pm | Talk by Dr. Kristin Y. Pettersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology |
| 3:10-3:30pm | Talk by Dr. Lihua Xie, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore |
| 3:30-4pm | Coffee break & Poster session |
| 4-4:20pm | Talk by Dr. Karl H. Johansson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden |
| 4:20-4:40pm | Talk by Dr. Jonathan How, MIT |
Registration:
Frontiers in Systems and Control – A Special Workshop
If you plan to attend the workshop, please register. The registration is required for the event planning and estimation.
Speakers:
| Speaker: Magnus Egerstedt, University of California, Irvine Title: Assured Autonomy, Safe Learning, and the Robotarium Abstract: Long-duration autonomy, where robots are to be deployed over longer time-scales outside of carefully curated labs, is fundamentally different from its “short-duration” counterpart in that what might go wrong sooner or later will go wrong. What this means is that stronger guarantees are needed in terms of performance. For instance, in the US, a road fatality occurs roughly every 100 million miles, which means that for an autonomous vehicle to live up to its promise of being safer than human-driven vehicles, that is the benchmark against which it must be compared. But a lot of strange and unpredictable things happen on the road during a 100 million mile journey, i.e., rare events are all of a sudden not so rare and the tails of the distributions must be accounted for by the perception and planning algorithms. The resulting notion of “assured autonomy” has implications for how goals and objectives should be combined and how learning processes should be endowed with safety guarantees. In this talk, we will discuss these issues and the current state of the autonomy landscape, instantiated on the Robotarium, which is a remotely accessible swarm robotics lab that has been in (almost) continuous operation for over three years, participating in over 7,500 autonomy missions. Bio: Dr. Magnus Egerstedt is the Dean of Engineering and a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining UCI, Egerstedt was on the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, serving as the Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director for Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of multi-robot systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, and serves as the President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology. |
| Speaker: Antonella Ferrara, University of Pavia, Italy Title: Deep Neural Network Based Practical Sliding Mode Generation in MPC of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems Abstract: In this talk, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme incorporating an Integral Sliding Mode (ISM) control component is presented to deal with a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. Classical design of MPC and ISM control requires the knowledge of the system nominal dynamics. In this talk, it is assumed that the nominal dynamics is unknown, and that matched disturbances affect the system state evolution. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are employed to estimate the drift dynamics and the control effectiveness matrix of the system. The approximation errors introduced by the DNNs, along with the matched disturbances acting on the system, are compensated by the DNN-based ISM control. The weights of the DNNs are tuned relying on adaptation laws derived from Lyapunov analysis, providing nice theoretical guarantees. The generation of DNN-based practical sliding modes results in being instrumental to apply MPC to the considered highly uncertain nonlinear systems. Simulation results obtained considering the classical Duffing oscillator will be shown to illustrate the concept. Bio: Antonella Ferrara received the M.Sc. degree (Cum Laude and printing honors) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Genoa, Italy, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Since 2005, she has been Full Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her research activities are mainly in the area of nonlinear control, with a special emphasis on control of uncertain systems via sliding modes generation, and application to road traffic, automotive systems, electro-mobility, robotics, and power systems. She is author and co-author of more than 450 publications including more than 160 journal papers, 2 monographs (published by Springer Nature and SIAM, respectively) and one edited book (IET). She was/is Principal Investigator and National Coordinator in several projects funded by the European Union and by the Italian Ministry for University and Research. She is currently serving as Associate Editor of Automatica, and Senior Editor of the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems. She served as Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, as well as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine and International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. Antonella Ferrara is the Chair of the EUCA Conference Editorial Board and the Director of Operations of the IEEE Control Systems Society. She is a member of the IEEE TC on Automotive Control, IEEE TC on Smart Cities, IEEE TC on Variable Structure Systems, IFAC TC on Nonlinear Control Systems, IFAC TC on Transportation Systems, and IFAC Technical Committee on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles. She is also serving as the Vice-Chair for Industry of the IFAC TC on Nonlinear Control Systems (2024-2026) and is a member of the IFAC Industry Board. She is also a member of the IFAC Conference Board, by virtue of her appointment as one of the two Program Chairs of the 24th IFAC Word Congress to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2029. Among several awards, she was a co-recipient of the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. She is a Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of IFAC. |
| Speaker: Mario di Bernardo, University of Naples Federico II, Italy Title: Orchestrating the Collective Behaviour of Complex Networks: Perspectives, Methodologies and Applications Abstract: Complex networks are fundamental to both natural phenomena and numerous technological applications, including, for example, power grids, cooperative robotic networks, social networks and the internet. These networks feature complex structures and the nodes often possess nonlinear dynamics, leading to emergent collective behaviors that cannot be solely explained by the dynamics of individual nodes. A key example of this is the emergence of coordination and synchronization, where all nodes in the network align towards the same collective behavior. In many applications, it is important to steer such collective behaviour towards some desired evolution in order to solve some task of interest. In this talk, I will address the challenge of controlling the collective behavior in complex networks of nonlinear dynamical systems. I will focus on various intervention strategies aimed at manipulating the nodes, edges, or overall structure of the network and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. I will also discuss how network science can suggest innovative ways of “closing the loop” when dealing with complex systems. Throughout the talk, I will use a selection of practical examples from both engineering and life sciences to illustrate our theoretical findings, demonstrating the relevance and application of our research in real-world scenarios. Bio: Mario di Bernardo (SMIEEE ’06, FIEEE 2012) is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Rector’s Delegate for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the new School of Advanced Studies set by the Italian Government in Naples in 2019. On 28th February 2007 he was bestowed the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific merits from the President of Italy. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in January 2012 for his contributions to the analysis, control and applications of nonlinear systems and complex networks. In 2009, he was elected President of the Italian Society for Chaos and Complexity for the term 2010-2013. He was re-elected in 2013 for the term 2014-2017. In 2006 and again in 2009 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. From 2011 to 2014 he was Vice President for Financial Activities of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. In 2015 he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society where he was elected member in 2022 for the term 2023-2025. He was Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for the two-year term 2016-2017. His research interests include the analysis, synchronization and control of complex network systems; piecewise-smooth dynamical systems; nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear control with applications to engineering and computational biology. He authored or co-authored more than 220 international scientific publications including more than 110 papers in scientific journals, a research monograph and two edited books. According to the international database SCOPUS (March 2024), his h-index is 53 and his publications received over 12,500 citations by other authors. In 2017, he received the IEEE George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award for Outstanding Research. He serves on the Editorial Board of several international scientific journals and conferences. From 1st January 2014 till 31st December 2015 he was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems: Regular Papers. He is Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Letters, the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control System Society and the European Control Association (EUCA). He was Associate Editor of Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems; the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers from 1999 to 2002 and again from 2008 to 2010, and the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Brief papers from 2003 till 2008. He is regularly invited as Plenary Speakers in Italy and abroad. He was Program co-Chair of the European Control Conference 2019, Publicity Chair of the IEEE ISCAS Conference 2018 and has been organizer and co-organizer of several scientific initiatives and events and received funding from several funding agencies and industry including the European Union, the UK research councils the Italian Ministry of Research and University. |
| Speaker: Ian Petersen, Australian National University Title: The Negative Imaginary Grid Abstract: This presentation first presents a brief overview of negative imaginary systems theory including basic linear definitions and stability results, applications to consensus in networked negative imaginary systems, notions of nonlinear negative imaginary systems and corresponding stability results, and consensus in networked nonlinear negative imaginary systems. We then consider the application of these ideas to frequency and angle stability in the electrical transmission grid. We show that the framework of networked nonlinear negative imaginary systems can provide a way for understanding the frequency and angle stability of the current transmission grid. It is shown that this framework also motivates the introduction of fast controllers into the grid using big batteries as actuators and phase measurement units as sensors. It is shown that such controllers can improve the energy carrying capacity of existing transmission lines and improve the overall resilience of the grid as more and more renewable resources are added. In particular, the theory allows controllers to be added one transmission line at a time, as they become overloaded within the existing grid. Bio: Ian R. Petersen was born in Victoria, Australia. He received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering in 1984 from the University of Rochester. From 1983 to 1985 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University. From 2017 he has been a Professor at the Australian National University in the School of Engineering. He was the Interim Director of the School of Engineering at the Australian National University from 2018-2019. From 1985 until 2016 he was with UNSW Canberra where he was a Scientia Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the School of Engineering and Information Technology. He has previously been ARC Executive Director for Mathematics Information and Communications, Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research for UNSW and an Australian Federation Fellow. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Systems and Control Letters, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. He also served as an Editor for Automatica. He is a fellow of IFAC, the IEEE and the Australian Academy of Science. His main research interests are in robust control theory, quantum control theory and stochastic control theory. |
| Speaker: Kristin Y. Pettersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Title: Snake Robot Control Abstract: Snake robots are motivated by the long, slender and flexible body of biological snakes, which allows them to move in virtually any environment on land and in water. Since the snake robot is essentially a manipulator arm that can move by itself, it has a number of interesting applications including firefighting applications and search and rescue operations. In water, the robot is a highly flexible and dexterous manipulator arm that can swim by itself like a sea snake. This highly flexible snake-like mechanism has excellent accessibility properties; it can for instance access virtually any location on subsea energy installations, move into the confined areas of shipwrecks, inside ice caves, or be used for observation of biological systems. Furthermore, not only can the swimming manipulator access narrow openings and confined areas, but it can also carry out highly complex manipulation tasks at this location since manipulation is an inherent capability of the system. In this talk, I will present our research on snake robots, and how this led to a new class of marine robots in the subsea industry.” Bio: Kristin Y. Pettersen is a Professor of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. She co-founded the subsea robotics company Eelume AS, where she was CEO 2015-2016 and is now a board member. She was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant 2020 and received the IEEE CSS 2020 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize. She is IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer, a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, and a member of the Academy of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Her main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis and control of autonomous robots, with an emphasis on marine robotics and snake robotics. |
| Speaker: Lihua Xie, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Title: Inverse Kalman Filtering Abstract: Inverse optimal control (IOC) was initiated in the 1960s and has been studied over the past decades with emphasis on the infinite horizon case. In recent years, the study on the IOC has been rejuvenated for finite-horizon and games settings. In this talk, we shall discuss the inverse Kalman filtering problem, where unknown parameters and/or inputs in a filtering model are to be reconstructed from observations of the posterior estimates that can be noisy or incomplete. By establishing a duality between the inverse Kalman filtering (IKF) and IOC, the identifiability and solvability of IKF is found to be closely related to that of an inverse linear quadratic regulator with implicit observations. Algorithms are then proposed to reconstruct the unknown sensor parameters as well as raw sensor measurements to demonstrate the efficiency and statistical consistency. Bio: Lihua Xie obtained his PhD degree from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 1992. He is currently President’s Chair with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University and Director, Center for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation (CARTIN). He has served as Head of Control and Instrumentation Division and Director of Delta-NTU Corporate Laboratory for Cyber-Physical Systems. His research areas include robust control, multi-agent systems, learning-based control, and unmanned systems. He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of Unmanned Systems and has served as an Editor of IET Book Series on Control and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, etc. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2011-2014) and the General Chair of the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023). He is currently Vice-President of IEEE Control System Society. Professor Xie is Fellow of Academy of Engineering Singapore and Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, CAA and AAIA. |
| Speaker: Karl H. Johansson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Title: How to Learn Flow Functions for Networked Nonlinear Control Systems Abstract: The flow function, which maps initial states and control inputs to state trajectories, is central to understanding and controlling complex systems. This talk presents the development of a neural network architecture designed to learn this operator from trajectory data. We validate a discrete-time recurrent neural network tailored for systems with specific discrete-time control inputs on nonlinear oscillators. Additionally, the framework is applied to surrogate modeling of spiking systems, such as networks of biological neurons. Our results demonstrate that the model accurately replicates spiking behavior while effectively addressing the challenges posed by data-intensive and computationally demanding training processes. This lecture is based on joint work with Miguel Aguiar and Amritam Das. Bio: Karl H. Johansson is Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Founding Director of Digital Futures. He earned his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Automatic Control from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Caltech, NTU and other prestigious institutions. His research interests focus on networked control systems and cyber-physical systems with applications in transportation, energy, and automation networks. For his scientific contributions, he has received numerous best paper awards and various distinctions from IEEE, IFAC, and other organizations. He has been awarded Distinguished Professor by the Swedish Research Council, Wallenberg Scholar by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Future Research Leader by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. He has also received the triennial IFAC Young Author Prize and IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer. He is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE CSS Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize. His extensive service to the academic community includes being President of the European Control Association, IEEE CSS Vice President Diversity, Outreach & Development, and Member of IEEE CSS Board of Governors and IFAC Council. He has served on the editorial boards of Automatica, IEEE TAC, IEEE TCNS and many other journals. He has also been a member of the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences. He is Fellow of both the IEEE and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. |
| Speaker: Jonathan How, MIT Title: Reachability-based Perspective on Safety Verification, Synthesis and Planning Abstract: Safety verification, synthesis, and planning are key challenges in control and robotics. In this talk, we address these issues through the common lens of reachability, with a focus on applications to different types of systems. We begin by examining reachability in the context of safety verification for nonlinear deterministic systems, with a special emphasis on Neural Feedback Loops (NFLs)—systems controlled by neural networks. While neural network-based control policies show significant potential, they can be unpredictable and may fail under certain conditions, making NFLs a critical and distinct challenge for verification. This portion of the talk will showcase recent advances in reachability analysis that support the safety verification of NFLs. The second part of the talk focuses on planning, particularly multi-query planning for linear stochastic systems. Multi-query planning seeks to create a reusable control framework that works across multiple initial configurations to reach a specified goal. A common approach is to synthesize an abstract graph of controllers, called a roadmap, which simplifies the planning problem into a graph search. This part will cover our recent work that defines the backward reachable set of distributions related to a roadmap. Additionally, we will explore various roadmap synthesis algorithms that account for this backward reachable space, enabling efficient multi-query planning with significantly smaller roadmaps as compared to existing methods in the literature. Bio: Jonathan P. How is the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1987, and his S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Prior to joining MIT in 2000, he was an assistant professor at Stanford University. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2015-19) and was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control System Society in 2019. His research focuses on robust planning and learning under uncertainty with an emphasis on multiagent systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AIAA and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021. |