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Spring 2010 GRASP Seminar – Roger Brockett, Harvard University, “Poisson Processes and the Design of Finite State Controllers”

January 15, 2010 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Abstract: It is widely recognized that many of the most important
challenges faced by control engineers involve the development of
methods to design and analyze systems having components most naturally
described by differential equations interacting  with components best
modeled using  sequential logic.  This situation can arise both in the
development of high volume, cost sensitive, consumer products and in the
design and certification of one of a kind, complex and expensive
systems.  The response of the control community to this challenge
includes work on limited communication control, learning control,
control languages, and various efforts on hybrid systems.  This work has
led to important new ideas but progress has been modest and the more
interesting results seem to lack the kind of unity that would lead to a
broadly inclusive theory.   In this talk we describe an approach to
problems of this type based on sample path descriptions of finite state
Markov processes and suitable adaptations known results about linear
systems.  The result is an insightful design technique yielding finite
state controllers for systems governed by differential equations. We
illustrate with concrete examples.

Presenter

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Roger Brockett is the An Wang professor of electrical engineering and
Computer Science at Harvard University. He has been exploring questions
in engineering and applied sciences since starting graduate school, and
has been teaching since his appointment as an Assistant Professor at MIT
in 1963. His contributions include early work on frequency domain
stability theory (multipliers), circle criterion instability,
differential geometric methods in nonlinear control, feedback
linearization and stabilization, the computation of Volterra series, a
Lie algebra approach to the sufficient statistics problem in nonlinear
estimation, work on robot kinematics and dynamics, formal languages for
motion control, hybrid systems, flows for computation related to
integrable systems, sub-Riemannian geometry, minimum attention control,
quantum control, quantized systems and, most recently, optimal control
of Markov processes. He is a fellow of the IEEE and of SIAM, has
received awards from IEEE (Control Systems Science and Engineering),
ASME (Oldenberger), SIAM (Reid Prize), and AACC (Eckman, and Bellman),
is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He is this year
recipient of the IEEE Leon Kirchmayer Award for Graduate Education. He
has directed approximately 60 Ph.D. theses and authored about 200
research papers.

Details

Date:
January 15, 2010
Time:
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Event Category: