Embedded Sensing and Control Systems

Networked embedded sensing and control systems are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in applications from manufacturing, chemical processes and autonomous robotic space, air and ground vehicles, to medicine and biology. They offer significant advantages, but present serious challenges to information processing, communication and decision-making. Several research issues will be discussed including the renewed interest in the distributed control of complex systems, in the strong interaction of embedded computer and physical systems (Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)) that requires a completely new way of thinking, and in fundamental feedback control issues such as feedback stabilization under communication constraints. Recent research in passivity as a property that allows us to build stable networked control systems will also be discussed. Highlighting feedback control fundamentals, the second part of the talk will focus on recent research results in model-based intermittent feedback control, an architecture that bridges the gap between sampled data systems and continuous feedback control and has, at the same time, excellent potential for networked control applications.
Panos Antsaklis is the H. Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Professor of Electrical Engineering and Concurrent Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He served as the Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics of the University of Notre Dame from 1999 to 2005. He is a graduate of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, and holds MS and PhD degrees from Brown University.
His recent research focuses on networked embedded systems and addresses problems in the interdisciplinary research area of control, computing and communication networks, and on hybrid and discrete event dynamical systems.
He has edited six books on Intelligent Autonomous Control, Hybrid Systems and on Networked Embedded Control Systems, he has co-authored two research monographs on the Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems Using Petri Nets, and two graduate textbooks "linear Systems" and in 2007 "a Linear Systems Primer."
He is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a recipient of the IEEE Distinguished Member Award of the Control Systems Society, and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal recipient. He was the 2006 recipient of the Brown Engineering Alumni Medal of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.