Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Abstract: Control design goals are often supported by the action of multiple actuators, differing in size, precision and bandwidth. The combined action of these actuators may then be seen qualitatively as redundant, even though an effective interplay of the available control inputs may induce desirable secondary goals in the closed loop. In this talk we will overview some recently proposed schemes attaining suboptimal allocation via computationally inexpensive gradient-based algorithms. Inspired by a few aerospace applications, we will discuss the impact of the proposed solutions on the arising hierarchy of the design goals. Throughout the talk we will also discuss the impact of stability theory for interconnected systems, notably nonlinear cascades and reduction theorems, to the end of proving desirable stability properties of the feedback control scheme with input allocation.

Biosketch: Luca Zaccarian received the Laurea and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Roma Tor Vergata (Italy) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. He has been Assistant Professor in control engineering at the University of Roma, Tor Vergata (Italy), from 2000 to 2006 and then Associate Professor. Since 2011 he is Directeur de Recherche at the LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse (France) and since 2013 he holds a part-time position at the University of Trento, Italy. Luca Zaccarian's main research interests include analysis and design of nonlinear and hybrid control systems, modeling and control of mechatronic systems. He has served in the organizing committee and TPC of several IEEE and IFAC conferences. He has been a member of the IEEE-CSS Conference Editorial Board and an associate editor for Systems and Control Letters and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is currently a member of the EUCA-CEB and an associate editor for the IFAC journal Automatica and for the European Journal of Control. He was a nominated member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE-CSS in 2014, and an elected member in 2017-2019. He was Student Activities Chair for the IEEE-CSS in 2015--2017 and is currently Associate Editor of Electronic Publications (Conference Information) for the IEEE-CSS. He was a recipient of the 2001 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award given by the American Automatic Control Council. He is a fellow of the IEEE, class of 2016.