2009 IEEE Multi-conference on Systems and Control

Organizer:
     Alexey Ushakov, GM Chief Scientist Russia & Eastern Europe

Automotive industry is one of the most affected by today’s world economy crisis. Therefore, industry challenges are multiplied by severe economical conditions.

What are these challenges?
Some are of Governmental / Societal nature, like:

The above issues will be addressed by the speakers of the workshop, top executives and researchers of GM Company divisions worldwide:

1.     Hans-Georg Frischkorn, Executive Director Global Vehicle Systems and Integration GM Europe: "The importance of electronics, controls, and software for automotive vehicles today and tomorrow"
2.     Man-Feng Chang, Group Manager Engine/Powertrain Control Systems GM R&D: "Driving the Future of Automotive Propulsion Systems"
3.     Jeffrey Glover, Director New Business Development GM CIS: "Russia: Still a Growth Market & Vehicle Technology Trends in European Emerging Markets"
4.     Alexey Ushakov, GM Chief Scientist Russia & Eastern Europe: "GM Research & Development Overview: Road to Innovations"

Organizer and Speaker:
     Farshad Khorrami (USA)

This workshop focuses on various aspects of autonomous unmanned vehicle technologies and deployment of such systems. We will cover a broad spectrum of unmanned vehicles including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned sea surface vehicles (USSV), unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV), and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). The workshop will address various topics such as asset allocation, collaborative behavior, obstacle avoidance, path planning, situational awareness, sensing, and control. Some experimental application on various vehicles will be presented. Sensory modalities that are applicable to various types of unmanned vehicle platforms for the purpose of navigation and environment sensing will be addressed including various practical issues that arise in the processing of the data from these sensory modalities. Algorithmic frameworks for image/signal processing of sensor data and construction of world maps will be outlined. Inertial navigation algorithms and inner-loop control laws will also be discussed briefly. Cooperative and decentralized planning for multi-agent missions will be described along with algorithms for resource allocation, formation maneuvering, collaborative optimal planning, etc.

Organizer and Speaker:
     Radhakant Padhi (India)

Even though many challenging real-life problems can be formulated in the framework of optimal control theory, it is well-known that it often gets trapped in the computational requirements. The classical approach relying on the calculus of variations often leads to a two-point boundary value problem (TPBVP), which cannot be solved in real-time (hence it leads to an open-loop solution). Alternately, attempt to get state feedback design following the philosophy of dynamic programming leads to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which a multi-dimensional coupled nonlinear partial differential equation. It is often impossible to solve the HJB equation analytically. Numerical solutions, on the other hand, get trapped in the "curse-of-dimensionality" issue, and hence is not a viable tool for online applications either. Hence, despite having nice features, utility of nonlinear optimal control formulations have been primarily confined only to off-line applications (e.g. like trajectory optimization). However, various attempts are being made in recent literature to overcome this computational complexity issue, thereby making the optimal control design approach a viable tool for online applications. This tutorial attempts to expose a variety of such methods under a unified framework, which include SDRE design, µ D technique, adaptive critic design and model-predictive static programming. Note that a good overview of the classical optimal control theory will be given before exposing the audience to these recently-developed techniques to provide them with su±cient motivation as well as to equip them with necessary background.

Organizer and Lecturer:
     Radhakant Padhi (India)

This workshop gives a systematic exposure to dynamic inversion design, which in recent years has evolved as a promising substitute for the gain scheduling design. Even though the philosophy of dynamic inversion relies on the concept of feedback linearization and associated concept of differential geometry, an alternate direct approach will be followed in this workshop to explain this nonlinear control design technique in a simplified manner. Next, several issues associated with this design approach (like the issue of stability of internal dynamics, applicability of the design for non-square systems etc.) will be outlined and possible remedies for those issues will also be explained in fair detail. One of the several important drawbacks of the dynamic inversion design is its sensitivity with respect to modeling inaccuracy. However, recently the idea of augmenting the dynamic inversion design with "neuro-adaptive design" has gained popularity because of its potential advantage in explicitly addressing this issue, thereby increasing the robustness of the dynamic inversion design. One such model-following neuro-adaptive approach (which is recently developed by the organizer with his co-workers) will be explained in this workshop in detail. A major advantage of this adaptive design approach is that it is applicable for non-affine and non-square nonlinear systems. Moreover, it can be augmented to "any" nominal control design in general. However, this workshop will be focused to its applicability for dynamic inversion design. Several benchmark and real-life problems, which have successfully been solved recently, will be presented in this workshop to demonstrate the applicability of this powerful design approach in various practical problems.

Organizer:
     Alexey S. Matveev (Russia)

Objective: to provide to research scholars, young faculty members, and practical engineers a comprehensive exposure and up-to-date overview of the latest advances in control system design and applications that are related to the methods of frequency and matrix inequalities, with emphasis on emerging and challenging issues in both theory and practice of control engineering.

Content and outline of major topics: Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the extensions and developments of the celebrated Yakubovich-Kalman lemma and neighboring results, the course systematically covers the related topics in linear and nonlinear control design. Specifically, it proceeds with presentation of recent advances in the areas of pulse-modulated systems, robust stability of non-classic nonlinear systems, nonlinear oscillations, synchronization of oscillations, nonlinear adaptive control, observation, and synchronization, invariance of control systems, and optimal control, as well as developments concerning several classic and recent open problems in control theory. The theoretical foundation of each topic is accompanied with discussion of practical ramifications and limitations, implementation issues, and applications. The course is suitable for students, instructors, and researchers who wish to obtain a broader perspective of the control engineering enterprise, as well as control engineers from all industrial applications seeking a coherent, self-contained overview of recent developments relevant to control practice.