Event-Triggered Control Using a Positive Systems Approach

Abstract: Control systems are a class of dynamical systems that contain forcing terms. When control systems are used in engineering applications, the forcing terms can represent forces that can be applied to the systems. Then the feedback control problem consists of finding formulas for the forcing terms, which are functions that can depend on the state of the systems, and which ensure a prescribed qualitative behavior of the dynamical systems, such as global asymptotic convergence towards an equilibrium point. Then the forcing terms are called feedback controls. Traditional feedback control methods call for continuously changing the feedback control values or changing their values at a sequence of times that are independent of the state of the control systems. This can lead to unnecessarily frequent changes in control values, which can be undesirable in engineering applications. This motivated the development of event-triggered control, whose objective is to find formulas for feedback controls whose values are only changed when it is essential to change them in order to achieve a prescribed system behavior. This talk summarizes the speaker’s recent research on event-triggered control theory and applications in marine robotics, which is collaborative with Corina Barbalata, Zhong-Ping Jiang, and Frederic Mazenc. The talk will be understandable to those familiar with the basic theory of ordinary differential equations. No prerequisite background in systems and control will be needed to understand and appreciate this talk.

Bio: Michael Malisoff is the Roy Paul Daniels Professor #3 in the LSU College of Science. He earned his PhD in Mathematics in 2000 from Rutgers University, and joined the LSU Department of Mathematics faculty in 2001. His research is on systems and control, with an emphasis on engineering applications. He has studied control problems for active magnetic bearings, bioreactors, DC motors, human heart rates, marine robots, microelectromechanical relays, neuromuscular electrical stimulation, and unmanned air vehicles. He received the First Place Student Best Paper Award at the 1999 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, two 3-year NSF Mathematical Sciences Priority Area grants, and 9 Best Presentation awards in American Control Conference sessions. He has served as Associate Editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and is currently an associate editor of European Journal of Control and of SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.