Research Focus

The Center’s mission is to maintain the highest international academic profile of UC San Diego’s control program, serve as a catalyst for interaction with industry, foster collaborations with researchers from other fields, and recruit outstanding undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty in control systems to UCSD.

The center’s faculty are leaders in many areas of mathematical control theory and decision-making, including robust control, nonlinear control, stochastic systems, adaptive control, hybrid control, system identification, optimal control, game theory, optimization algorithms, geometric mechanics and nonholonomic systems, delay systems, and distributed parameter systems. These theories, while frequently engendered by specific applications, form the intellectual core of Control and Dynamic Systems and are applicable to a wide range of problem domains, some of which are mentioned below. The ability to access and to invent new theory is critical to the formulation of approaches to real problems and to the provision of performance specifications and guarantees.

Research Applications:

Robots

Control  and Analysis of Robotic Systems

From control of individual manipulators, such as in robotic surgery, to autonomous robotic vehicles and their networks and swarms.

Energy

Control and Optimization of Power Systems

Control, stabilization, and optimization in power networks, including those that incorporate renewable and intermittent sources.

Fluids

Control of Fluids, Propulsion, and Engines

Gas turbines and aeroengines, automotive engines, magnetic fusion, and a wide spectrum of applications in control and estimation.

Sensing

Sensor Networks and Unmanned Systems

Coordination of unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, missions under deceptive information, and control over wireless systems.

Aircraft

Aircraft Control and Optimization

From real-time control and optimization of aircraft with highly uncertain aerodynamics to multidisciplinary optimization in aircraft design.

Mechatronics

Control of Positioning Systems

Applications to hard disk drives, semiconductor manufacturing, and efforts in atomic force microscopes.

Biology

Control and Analysis of Biological Systems 

From sensory-motor control in musculo-skeletal and neural systems, to animal locomotion, to control of genetic expression in regulatory networks, to medical devices.

AI

Robust Algorithms for Decision Making

Feedback-based decision-making algorithms, centralized or decentralized, can be studied via control theoretic tools, enabling the synthesis of novel and better state-of-the-art algorithms.

Transportation

Connected Transportation Systems

From traffic control via dynamic tooling and intelligent traffic light systems, to congestion controllers that exploit controllable autonomous vehicles and  PDE-based congestion models.