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Keynote Speakers

Plenary Speakers

How to Use the Nonlinearities to Control Systems: Methods and Open Problems

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Jean-Michel Coron
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
France

Jean-Michel Coron received the diploma of engineer degree from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France, in 1978 and from the Corps des Mines in 1981. He received the Thèse d’Etat in 1982. He has been a Researcher at Ecole des Mines, then Associate Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, and Professor at University Paris-Sud 11. He is currently a Professor at University Pierre et Marie Curie. His research interests include nonlinear partial differential equations and nonlinear control theory. Jean-Michel Coron delivered a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 and he is invited to deliver a talk at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2015. He was a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France from 2003 to 2013. 
Abstract:
Various methods to use the nonlinearities in order to control a nonlinear system are presented. This includes Lie brackets, return method, scaling, quasi-static deformations, power series expansion and the phantom tracking method. A special emphasis is put on systems modeled by means of partial differential equations. Applications to control of fluids and quantum systems will be briefly sketched.
Previous

Communities and Dynamics in Social Networks and Mobile Phone Networks

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Vincent Blondel
Université Catholique de Louvain
Belgium

Vincent D. Blondel is professor of applied mathematics and dean of engineering at the University of Louvain (Belgium). He is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) where he was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar in 2004-2005 and 2010-2011. In 2012-2013 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Vincent has directed more than thirty PhD and Master thesis. He is an IEEE Fellow and is the recipient of several international prizes, including the IEEE Ruberti prize and the SIAM prize on control and systems theory. His recent work on networks has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, La Recherche, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times.
Abstract: 
We describe several recent results on large network analysis with a special emphasis on community detection and on the analysis of mobile phone datasets. In particular, we describe the Louvain method - now used by LinkedIn for its visualization application InMaps - that has sub-quadratic computational complexity and can be routinely used for analyzing networks with billions of nodes or links. We analyze communities obtained on a nationwide dataset of criminal records, as well as on a social network constructed from mobile phone communications in Belgium and in France that span periods covering several months. We also describe applications of mobile phone dataset analysis for a range of applications such as urban planning, traffic optimization, monitoring of development policy, crisis management, and control of epidemics. With these applications in mind we overview results obtained in the "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge organized jointly with the telecom operator Orange on the analysis of mobile phone datasets from an African country and for development purposes.

Getting Multi-agent Systems to Cooperate

Winner of the European Control Award for his contribution to networked control systems and multi-agent systems.

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Luca Schenato
University of Padova
Italy

Luca Schenato is currently Associate Professor at the University of Padova. He received the Laurea Degree from the University of Padova in 1999  and the Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003. He held a visiting position at U.C. Berkeley in 2013-2014 and was the recipient of the Italian Professorship "Returning Brains" in 2004 and of the Eli Jury Award from the EECS Department of UC Berkeley in 2006. His research interests include distributed control, estimation and optimization for multi-agent systems, control subject to communication constraints in networked control systems, and control of biomimetic locomotion. He was one of the organizers of the Conference on Robotics, Communication and Coordination (Robocomm) and the Workshop on Estimation and Control of Networked Systems (Necsys). He is member of IEEE and of the IFAC Technical Commiteee on "Networked Systems",  and served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control.
Abstract: 
Getting large scale autonomous multi-agent systems to cooperatively perform tasks is a formidable challenge. A key issue is robustness, since systemic failures can result from component failure for poorly designed cooperation schemes. There is an emerging view that multi-layered architectures, where each layer builds upon few primitive functions from lower layers can provide correct-by-construction robustness guarantees. I will show how many applications which require cooperation, ranging from multi-sensor calibration to networked clock synchronization, from multi-camera perimeter patrolling to multi-robot map building, can be solved via the consensus algorithm, a "primitive" function for which there exists very robust and provably correct implementations. I will close by sharing some personal views about research challenges in the control of large scale networks.

Semi-Plenary Speakers

Cyber-Secure Control: Challenges and Quantification

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Henrik Sandberg
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Sweden

Henrik Sandberg received the M.Sc. degree in engineering physics and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from Lund University, Lund, Sweden, in 1999 and 2004, respectively. He is an Associate Professor with the Automatic Control Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA. He has held visiting appointments with the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2013, he is a visiting scholar at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT, Cambridge, USA. His current research interests include secure networked control, power systems, model reduction, and fundamental limitations in control. Dr. Sandberg was a recipient of the Best Student Paper Award from the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2004 and an Ingvar Carlsson Award from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research in 2007. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IFAC Journal Automatica.
Abstract: 
Cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures, such as power networks, are a growing concern in society and have received considerable media attention lately. In this talk, we therefore discuss possible implications for networked control systems under such malicious attacks. We introduce an adversary modeling framework and use it for quantifying cyber security of control systems by means of constrained optimization problems. These optimization problems help to quantify trade-offs between attack impact on control performance, attack detectability, and adversarial resources. The first illustrating example concerns Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for electric power networks. We both illustrate how the trade-off analysis can be done efficiently using minimum-cut algorithms for graphs, and how to use the outcome for allocation of limited protection resources. In the second illustrating example, we quantify cyber security in a wireless control system for a quadruple-tank process.

Model Reduction by Moment Matching for Linear and Nonlinear Systems

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Alessandro Astolfi
Imperial College London,
United Kingdom &
University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy

Alessandro Astolfi was born in Rome, Italy, in 1967. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy, in 1991, the M.S. degree in information theory and the Ph.D. (with a medal of honor) degree from ETH-Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1996. Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, London, U.K., where he is currently Professor of Non-linear Control Theory and Head of the Control and Power Group. From 1998 to 2003, he was also an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico of Milano, Milan, Italy. Since 2005, he is a Professor with the Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemi e Produzione, University of Rome "Tor Vergata". He is author of more than 100 journal papers, of 35 book chapters and of over 200 papers in refereed conference proceedings. His research interests are focused on mathematical control theory and control applications, with special emphasis for the problems of discontinuous stabilization, robust stabilization, robust and adaptive control, and model reduction. A. Astolfi is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IET (UK) He is the recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Society Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize (2007) in "recognition of distinguished cutting-edge contributions by a young researcher to the theory or applications of systems and control". He is also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award and of the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award (in 2012).
Abstract: 
The model reduction problem for linear and nonlinear systems is addressed using the notion of moment. A re-visitation of the linear theory allows to obtain novel results for linear systems and to develop a nonlinear enhancement of the notion of moment. This, in turn, is used to pose and solve the model reduction problem by moment matching for nonlinear systems, to develop a notion of frequency response for nonlinear systems, and to solve model reduction problems in the presence of constraints on the reduced model. Connections between the proposed results, projection methods, and interpolation theory are presented. Applications to the model reduction of delay, Hamiltonian and gradient systems are also discussed.

Control Challenges in Physical Human-Robot Interaction

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Sandra Hirche
Technische Universität München
Germany

Sandra Hirche holds the Liesel Beckmann Chair and is director of the Institute for Information-oriented Control in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Technische Universität München, Germany (since 2013). She received the diploma engineer degree in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering in 2002 from the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and the Doctor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in 2005 from the Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. From 2005-2007 she has been a PostDoc fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science at the Fujita Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Prior to her present appointment she has been an associate professor at Technische Universität München. Her research interests include networked dynamical systems, cooperative and distributed control, and event-triggered control with applications in human-in-the-loop systems, intelligent human-machine interaction, haptics, and robotics. Sandra Hirche has received multiple awards including the IFAC World Congress Best Poster Award in 2005, the Best Paper Awards of IEEE Worldhaptics in 2009, and an ERC Starting Grant "Control based on Human Models" in 2013. Sandra Hirche is senior member of the IEEE. She serves as Chair for Student Activities in the IEEE Control System Society (CSS) since 2009, as Chair of the CSS Awards Subcommittee on "CDC Best Student-Paper Award" since 2010, and as member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CSS 2010-2013.
Abstract: 
Human-in-the-loop and human-robot interaction systems gain more and more relevance in research and applications such as assistive systems and joint decision making systems. Application domains include collaborative human-robot production, rescue and surveillance, mobility and manipulation aids for elderly, rehabilitation, and brain-machine interfaces. The focus of the talk is on physical human-robot interaction. During physical contact information and more importantly energy is exchanged posing significant challenges for real-time human-adaptive and safe decision making and control. From a control point of view the lack of parametric models for the human is the challenge.  The talk discusses selected control challenges that need to be solved in physical human-robot interaction covering different interaction paradigms such as pure master-slave and cooperative systems. Approaches to represent human-oriented control goals, modeling the human, and concrete control designs for physical human-robot interaction are presented.

Fast NMPC: Some Good News and Some Facts to Keep In Mind!

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Mazen Alamir
GIPSA-Lab, University of Grenoble
France 

Mazen Alamir is research director at CNRS, France. He graduated in Mechanics (Grenoble, 1990) and Aeronautics (Toulouse 1992). He received his Ph.D. in NMPC in 1995. Since 1996, he served in the Control Systems Department of Gipsa-lab, Grenoble. His main research topics are model predictive control, moving-horizon observers, nonlinear hybrid systems and signature-based diagnosis and optimal treatment of cancer. He is member of the IFAC technical committee on Nonlinear Systems and served as head of the “Nonlinear Systems and Complexity” research group of Gipsa-lab. He organized the first IFAC workshop on NMPC for Fast System, Grenoble 2006. He managed several industrial contracts on various topics including Cryogenics (CEA), Building Management Systems, Stirling Engine (Schneider-Electric), Power Electronics (ST-Microelectronics), Steam-Engines (SEB), Tilting Trains (ALSTOM), Automated Manual Transmission (IFP).
Abstract: 
Fast Nonlinear Model Predictive Control is fortunately no more an emerging topic. The progress that has been achieved during the last decade, in both theoretical assessment and available software, might even suggest that it is an almost settled issue. The fast growing and sometimes highly technical tricks that emerged in the pursuit of the slightest milliseconds of computation time sometimes hide major facts that are worth keeping in mind.

This talk adopts a balanced position by assessing the indisputable success of the fast NMPC “revolution” while emphasizing the remaining issues to be tackled. This is done by recalling some facts and showing some illustrative examples from recent industrial validation of fast MPC related solutions.

 

A Guided Tour in Event-Triggered Control

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Maurice Heemels 
Eindhoven University of Technology 
Netherlands

Maurice Heemels received the M.Sc. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in control theory (both summa cum laude) from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995 and 1999, respectively. After being an Assistant Professor at the EE dept at TU/e and a research fellow at the Embedded Systems Institute (ESI), he is currently a Full Professor in the Control Systems Technology Group at the ME department at TU/e. Maurice held visiting research positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland (2001), at Océ, Venlo, the Netherlands (2004) and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA (2008). His current research interests include control theory, hybrid and cyber-physical systems, networked, wireless and event-triggered control and constrained systems including model predictive control.
Abstract: 
Recent developments in computer and communication technologies are leading to an increasingly networked and wireless world. In the context of networked control systems this raises new challenging questions, especially when the computation, communication and energy resources of the system are limited. To efficiently use the available resources it is desirable to limit the control actions to instances when the system really needs attention. Unfortunately, the classical time-triggered control paradigm is based on performing sensing and actuation actions periodically in time (irrespective of the state of the system) rather than when the system needs attention. Therefore, it is of interest to consider event-triggered control as an alternative paradigm, as it seems much more natural to trigger control actions by well-designed events involving the system’s state, output or other available information, i.e. bringing feedback in the sensing and actuation processes. In this talk, we discuss the basics of event-triggered control, recent advances and important challenges ahead of us in this growing research field. Moreover, side trips will be made to related areas such as self-triggered control, robust control over uncertain communication channels, and hybrid systems.

Complexity and Performance in Large-Scale and Distributed Systems

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Bassam Bamieh 
University of California at Santa Barbara
USA

Bassam Bamieh is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Valparaiso University (Valparaiso, IN) in 1983, and his M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University (Houston, TX) in 1986 and 1992 respectively. Prior to joining UCSB in 1998, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1991-98). His current research interests include robust and optimal Control, distributed control and dynamical systems, shear flow transition and turbulence, and active control in thermoacoustic energy conversion devices. He is a two-time recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Society G. S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, an AACC Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Abstract: 
Control theory and engineering uses various measures to quantify a system's performance. These range from the classical gain/phase margins and pole locations to various system norms and robustness measures. For lumped low order systems, there are various relations and bounds between these different performance metrics, and it is uncommon to find examples where they differ dramatically. The situation is significantly more complex and subtle for large-scale and distributed system. Various system norms and performance measures diverge and are difficult to relate via bounds. This is not a consequence of mathematical difficulties, but rather reflects the fundamental richness in the underlying physical behavior of these systems. I will present several examples from networks and distributed parameter systems, and argue that several notions including growth bounds, controllability and reachability need to be reexamined for these systems. 
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13th European Control Conference - June 24-27, 2014 - Strasbourg

Keynote Speakers

Plenary Speakers

How to Use the Nonlinearities to Control Systems: Methods and Open Problems

Download presentation
Picture
Jean-Michel Coron
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
France

Jean-Michel Coron received the diploma of engineer degree from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France, in 1978 and from the Corps des Mines in 1981. He received the Thèse d’Etat in 1982. He has been a Researcher at Ecole des Mines, then Associate Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, and Professor at University Paris-Sud 11. He is currently a Professor at University Pierre et Marie Curie. His research interests include nonlinear partial differential equations and nonlinear control theory. Jean-Michel Coron delivered a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 and he is invited to deliver a talk at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2015. He was a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France from 2003 to 2013. 
Abstract:
Various methods to use the nonlinearities in order to control a nonlinear system are presented. This includes Lie brackets, return method, scaling, quasi-static deformations, power series expansion and the phantom tracking method. A special emphasis is put on systems modeled by means of partial differential equations. Applications to control of fluids and quantum systems will be briefly sketched.
Previous

Communities and Dynamics in Social Networks and Mobile Phone Networks

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Vincent Blondel
Université Catholique de Louvain
Belgium

Vincent D. Blondel is professor of applied mathematics and dean of engineering at the University of Louvain (Belgium). He is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) where he was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar in 2004-2005 and 2010-2011. In 2012-2013 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Vincent has directed more than thirty PhD and Master thesis. He is an IEEE Fellow and is the recipient of several international prizes, including the IEEE Ruberti prize and the SIAM prize on control and systems theory. His recent work on networks has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, La Recherche, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times.
Abstract: 
We describe several recent results on large network analysis with a special emphasis on community detection and on the analysis of mobile phone datasets. In particular, we describe the Louvain method - now used by LinkedIn for its visualization application InMaps - that has sub-quadratic computational complexity and can be routinely used for analyzing networks with billions of nodes or links. We analyze communities obtained on a nationwide dataset of criminal records, as well as on a social network constructed from mobile phone communications in Belgium and in France that span periods covering several months. We also describe applications of mobile phone dataset analysis for a range of applications such as urban planning, traffic optimization, monitoring of development policy, crisis management, and control of epidemics. With these applications in mind we overview results obtained in the "Data for Development" (D4D) challenge organized jointly with the telecom operator Orange on the analysis of mobile phone datasets from an African country and for development purposes.

Getting Multi-agent Systems to Cooperate

Winner of the European Control Award for his contribution to networked control systems and multi-agent systems.

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Luca Schenato
University of Padova
Italy

Luca Schenato is currently Associate Professor at the University of Padova. He received the Laurea Degree from the University of Padova in 1999  and the Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003. He held a visiting position at U.C. Berkeley in 2013-2014 and was the recipient of the Italian Professorship "Returning Brains" in 2004 and of the Eli Jury Award from the EECS Department of UC Berkeley in 2006. His research interests include distributed control, estimation and optimization for multi-agent systems, control subject to communication constraints in networked control systems, and control of biomimetic locomotion. He was one of the organizers of the Conference on Robotics, Communication and Coordination (Robocomm) and the Workshop on Estimation and Control of Networked Systems (Necsys). He is member of IEEE and of the IFAC Technical Commiteee on "Networked Systems",  and served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control.
Abstract: 
Getting large scale autonomous multi-agent systems to cooperatively perform tasks is a formidable challenge. A key issue is robustness, since systemic failures can result from component failure for poorly designed cooperation schemes. There is an emerging view that multi-layered architectures, where each layer builds upon few primitive functions from lower layers can provide correct-by-construction robustness guarantees. I will show how many applications which require cooperation, ranging from multi-sensor calibration to networked clock synchronization, from multi-camera perimeter patrolling to multi-robot map building, can be solved via the consensus algorithm, a "primitive" function for which there exists very robust and provably correct implementations. I will close by sharing some personal views about research challenges in the control of large scale networks.

Semi-Plenary Speakers

Cyber-Secure Control: Challenges and Quantification

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Henrik Sandberg
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Sweden

Henrik Sandberg received the M.Sc. degree in engineering physics and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from Lund University, Lund, Sweden, in 1999 and 2004, respectively. He is an Associate Professor with the Automatic Control Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA. He has held visiting appointments with the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2013, he is a visiting scholar at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT, Cambridge, USA. His current research interests include secure networked control, power systems, model reduction, and fundamental limitations in control. Dr. Sandberg was a recipient of the Best Student Paper Award from the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2004 and an Ingvar Carlsson Award from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research in 2007. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IFAC Journal Automatica.
Abstract: 
Cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures, such as power networks, are a growing concern in society and have received considerable media attention lately. In this talk, we therefore discuss possible implications for networked control systems under such malicious attacks. We introduce an adversary modeling framework and use it for quantifying cyber security of control systems by means of constrained optimization problems. These optimization problems help to quantify trade-offs between attack impact on control performance, attack detectability, and adversarial resources. The first illustrating example concerns Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for electric power networks. We both illustrate how the trade-off analysis can be done efficiently using minimum-cut algorithms for graphs, and how to use the outcome for allocation of limited protection resources. In the second illustrating example, we quantify cyber security in a wireless control system for a quadruple-tank process.

Model Reduction by Moment Matching for Linear and Nonlinear Systems

Picture
Alessandro Astolfi
Imperial College London,
United Kingdom &
University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy

Alessandro Astolfi was born in Rome, Italy, in 1967. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy, in 1991, the M.S. degree in information theory and the Ph.D. (with a medal of honor) degree from ETH-Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1996. Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, London, U.K., where he is currently Professor of Non-linear Control Theory and Head of the Control and Power Group. From 1998 to 2003, he was also an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico of Milano, Milan, Italy. Since 2005, he is a Professor with the Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemi e Produzione, University of Rome "Tor Vergata". He is author of more than 100 journal papers, of 35 book chapters and of over 200 papers in refereed conference proceedings. His research interests are focused on mathematical control theory and control applications, with special emphasis for the problems of discontinuous stabilization, robust stabilization, robust and adaptive control, and model reduction. A. Astolfi is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IET (UK) He is the recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Society Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize (2007) in "recognition of distinguished cutting-edge contributions by a young researcher to the theory or applications of systems and control". He is also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award and of the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award (in 2012).
Abstract: 
The model reduction problem for linear and nonlinear systems is addressed using the notion of moment. A re-visitation of the linear theory allows to obtain novel results for linear systems and to develop a nonlinear enhancement of the notion of moment. This, in turn, is used to pose and solve the model reduction problem by moment matching for nonlinear systems, to develop a notion of frequency response for nonlinear systems, and to solve model reduction problems in the presence of constraints on the reduced model. Connections between the proposed results, projection methods, and interpolation theory are presented. Applications to the model reduction of delay, Hamiltonian and gradient systems are also discussed.

Control Challenges in Physical Human-Robot Interaction

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Picture
Sandra Hirche
Technische Universität München
Germany

Sandra Hirche holds the Liesel Beckmann Chair and is director of the Institute for Information-oriented Control in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Technische Universität München, Germany (since 2013). She received the diploma engineer degree in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering in 2002 from the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and the Doctor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in 2005 from the Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. From 2005-2007 she has been a PostDoc fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science at the Fujita Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Prior to her present appointment she has been an associate professor at Technische Universität München. Her research interests include networked dynamical systems, cooperative and distributed control, and event-triggered control with applications in human-in-the-loop systems, intelligent human-machine interaction, haptics, and robotics. Sandra Hirche has received multiple awards including the IFAC World Congress Best Poster Award in 2005, the Best Paper Awards of IEEE Worldhaptics in 2009, and an ERC Starting Grant "Control based on Human Models" in 2013. Sandra Hirche is senior member of the IEEE. She serves as Chair for Student Activities in the IEEE Control System Society (CSS) since 2009, as Chair of the CSS Awards Subcommittee on "CDC Best Student-Paper Award" since 2010, and as member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CSS 2010-2013.
Abstract: 
Human-in-the-loop and human-robot interaction systems gain more and more relevance in research and applications such as assistive systems and joint decision making systems. Application domains include collaborative human-robot production, rescue and surveillance, mobility and manipulation aids for elderly, rehabilitation, and brain-machine interfaces. The focus of the talk is on physical human-robot interaction. During physical contact information and more importantly energy is exchanged posing significant challenges for real-time human-adaptive and safe decision making and control. From a control point of view the lack of parametric models for the human is the challenge.  The talk discusses selected control challenges that need to be solved in physical human-robot interaction covering different interaction paradigms such as pure master-slave and cooperative systems. Approaches to represent human-oriented control goals, modeling the human, and concrete control designs for physical human-robot interaction are presented.

Fast NMPC: Some Good News and Some Facts to Keep In Mind!

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Mazen Alamir
GIPSA-Lab, University of Grenoble
France 

Mazen Alamir is research director at CNRS, France. He graduated in Mechanics (Grenoble, 1990) and Aeronautics (Toulouse 1992). He received his Ph.D. in NMPC in 1995. Since 1996, he served in the Control Systems Department of Gipsa-lab, Grenoble. His main research topics are model predictive control, moving-horizon observers, nonlinear hybrid systems and signature-based diagnosis and optimal treatment of cancer. He is member of the IFAC technical committee on Nonlinear Systems and served as head of the “Nonlinear Systems and Complexity” research group of Gipsa-lab. He organized the first IFAC workshop on NMPC for Fast System, Grenoble 2006. He managed several industrial contracts on various topics including Cryogenics (CEA), Building Management Systems, Stirling Engine (Schneider-Electric), Power Electronics (ST-Microelectronics), Steam-Engines (SEB), Tilting Trains (ALSTOM), Automated Manual Transmission (IFP).
Abstract: 
Fast Nonlinear Model Predictive Control is fortunately no more an emerging topic. The progress that has been achieved during the last decade, in both theoretical assessment and available software, might even suggest that it is an almost settled issue. The fast growing and sometimes highly technical tricks that emerged in the pursuit of the slightest milliseconds of computation time sometimes hide major facts that are worth keeping in mind.

This talk adopts a balanced position by assessing the indisputable success of the fast NMPC “revolution” while emphasizing the remaining issues to be tackled. This is done by recalling some facts and showing some illustrative examples from recent industrial validation of fast MPC related solutions.

 

A Guided Tour in Event-Triggered Control

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Picture
Maurice Heemels 
Eindhoven University of Technology 
Netherlands

Maurice Heemels received the M.Sc. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in control theory (both summa cum laude) from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995 and 1999, respectively. After being an Assistant Professor at the EE dept at TU/e and a research fellow at the Embedded Systems Institute (ESI), he is currently a Full Professor in the Control Systems Technology Group at the ME department at TU/e. Maurice held visiting research positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland (2001), at Océ, Venlo, the Netherlands (2004) and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA (2008). His current research interests include control theory, hybrid and cyber-physical systems, networked, wireless and event-triggered control and constrained systems including model predictive control.
Abstract: 
Recent developments in computer and communication technologies are leading to an increasingly networked and wireless world. In the context of networked control systems this raises new challenging questions, especially when the computation, communication and energy resources of the system are limited. To efficiently use the available resources it is desirable to limit the control actions to instances when the system really needs attention. Unfortunately, the classical time-triggered control paradigm is based on performing sensing and actuation actions periodically in time (irrespective of the state of the system) rather than when the system needs attention. Therefore, it is of interest to consider event-triggered control as an alternative paradigm, as it seems much more natural to trigger control actions by well-designed events involving the system’s state, output or other available information, i.e. bringing feedback in the sensing and actuation processes. In this talk, we discuss the basics of event-triggered control, recent advances and important challenges ahead of us in this growing research field. Moreover, side trips will be made to related areas such as self-triggered control, robust control over uncertain communication channels, and hybrid systems.

Complexity and Performance in Large-Scale and Distributed Systems

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Bassam Bamieh 
University of California at Santa Barbara
USA

Bassam Bamieh is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Valparaiso University (Valparaiso, IN) in 1983, and his M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University (Houston, TX) in 1986 and 1992 respectively. Prior to joining UCSB in 1998, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1991-98). His current research interests include robust and optimal Control, distributed control and dynamical systems, shear flow transition and turbulence, and active control in thermoacoustic energy conversion devices. He is a two-time recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Society G. S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, an AACC Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Abstract: 
Control theory and engineering uses various measures to quantify a system's performance. These range from the classical gain/phase margins and pole locations to various system norms and robustness measures. For lumped low order systems, there are various relations and bounds between these different performance metrics, and it is uncommon to find examples where they differ dramatically. The situation is significantly more complex and subtle for large-scale and distributed system. Various system norms and performance measures diverge and are difficult to relate via bounds. This is not a consequence of mathematical difficulties, but rather reflects the fundamental richness in the underlying physical behavior of these systems. I will present several examples from networks and distributed parameter systems, and argue that several notions including growth bounds, controllability and reachability need to be reexamined for these systems. 
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