The Advanced Control Theory and Applications Laboratory is involved in research on stability and control of nonlinear dynamical systems and in particular large-scale interconnected systems control, cooperative control for multi-agent systems, hierarchical nonlinear switching control, hybrid control and Impulsive for nonlinear systems, thermodynamics of systems, thermodynamic modeling of mechanical and aerospace systems and nonlinear analysis and control of biological and physiological systems. The laboratory is equipped with several experimental platforms for the verification of our theoretical findings.
Recent research on multi-vehicle coordination supported by the Office of Naval Research and NAVSEA allowed exploring several approaches to cooperative control design, including finite-time coordination and the design of hybrid control architectures. In addition, the laboratory conducts multidisciplinary research in emerging areas such as the analysis and control of biological systems, the theoretical characterization of chemical reaction networks systems and the thermodynamics of large-scale systems.
Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamic systems with inputs and how their behavior is modified through feedback. The usual goal of control theory is to control a system, often called the plant, so that its output follows a desired control signal, called a reference, which can be a fixed or changing value. For this, a controller is designed that monitors the output and compares it with the reference. The difference between the actual output and the desired output, called an error signal, is applied as feedback to the system input, to bring the actual output closer to the reference. Some topics studied in control theory are stability (if the output converges to the reference value or oscillates around it), controllability and observability.
Extensive use is usually made of a diagrammatic style known as the block diagram. The transfer function, also known as system function or network function, is a mathematical representation of the relationship between input and output based on the differential equations describing the system.
Although a major application of control theory is in control systems engineering, which deals with the design of process control systems for the industry, other applications go far beyond this. As a general theory of feedback systems, control theory is useful wherever feedback occurs. Some examples are physiology, electronics, climate modeling, machine design, ecosystems, navigation, neural networks, predator-prey interaction, gene expression and production theory.