Download Control of Nonlinear and Uncertain Systems

Cooperative Control of a Collection of Constrained Nonlinear
Systems: Theory and Application
Dr. Zhihua Qu, Professor and Director
Electrical Engineering Program
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816
http://people.cecs.ucf.edu/qu/
Wednesday 25 Jan., 11am, ARRI Board Room
ABSTRACT
The presentation begins with some of on-going research issues in control of nonlinear and
uncertain systems and then focuses upon two subjects.
The first deals with stabilization and tracking control designs for nonholonomic systems.
Canonical form, controllability, and existence of stabilizing control are reviewed. It is shown that
nonholonomic systems are nonlinearly controllable but not linearly controllable around the
origin. Because of this and other inherent difficulties, a new control design framework is
proposed by introducing state and control transformations and by recovering linear
controllability for nonholonomic systems in a transformed space. As a result, time-varying
smooth controls can systematically be synthesized. Moreover, closed form controls can be
derived and then optimized to achieve near optimal performance (the best achievable real time).
The second topic deals with cooperative control of a set of individual dynamical systems among
which information is communicated/collected via a communication/sensing network.
Information exchange in the network observes local, intermittent, and dynamically changing
patterns that cannot be modeled in any way. To study cooperative controllability of such
networked dynamical systems, a matrix-theoretical approach is developed for both analysis and
cooperative control designs, and a necessary and sufficient condition on cooperativeness is found.
The results are illustrated by applications to unmanned vehicles.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Zhihua Qu received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of
Technology in 1990. Since then, he has been with the University of Central Florida. Currently,
he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was the
Director/Chair of Electrical Engineering from 1999 to 2003. His main research interests are
nonlinear systems, robust and adaptive control designs, and robotics. He has published a number
of papers in these areas and is the author of two books, Robust Control of Nonlinear Uncertain
Systems by Wiley Interscience and Robust Tracking Control of Robotic Manipulators by IEEE
Press. He is presently serving as an Associate Editor for Automatica and for International
Journal of Robotics and Automation. He is a senior member of IEEE.