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Systems and Control

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The key feature of any control system, whether it is applied in an aerospace system, a chemical plant or a robot, is the exploration of feedback. Sensors, such as cameras and accelerometers, are essential in a control system for providing information about the process. With this information we can evaluate whether the system is behaving as required or a corrective action is needed, that is, the information is processed and fed back to the actuators to effect improved control.

Feedback allows us the achievement of accuracy in the presence of uncertainties and/or disturbances. The essence of control theory can be summarised as the optimisation of feedback control laws for a good trade off between performance and robustness. Devising methodologies for controller design, tuning and monitoring is mainly what control systems research engineers do.

The breadth of control methodologies includes the research fields of robust control, optimal control, adaptive control, discrete-event and hybrid systems control, nonlinear systems, intelligent systems, stability theory, and indeed many subspecialties such as the so-called H-infinity methods, risk-sensitive control, linear quadratic control, mu-synthesis, etc.

All these advanced control techniques are built on models of the process, therefore the areas of modelling, identification and estimation are also important research fields closely related to control systems.

The staff involved in this area are

Professor Brian Anderson

Professor David Hill

Professor Jonathan Manton

Dr Jochen Trumpf

Dr Baris Fidan (NICTA)

Dr Michael Rotkowitz

Dr Liansheng Tan

Jin Fan (MASCOS)

Sehjeong Kim (MASCOS)

Jun Zhao (MASCOS)

Bin Liu

Yongxiang Xia

Guohua Zhang

Current PhD students are

Brad Yu

Iman Shams

Alex (Yantao) Feng

Sung Han Cha

Desmond Chik

Lachlan Blackhall

Li ying Wei

Charles (Chi) Li

Recently Completed PhD students

Tanya Conroy (2000)	"Topics in Nonlinear Signal Processing"
Jeremy S. Thorne (2001)	"Fast Identification vis Risk-Sensitive Methods"
Stephen Su (2002)	''Nonlinear robust disturbance rejection''
Matthew Smith(2005)	"Restricted Reachability Operators"
Kaiyang Yang(2006)	"Numerical Algorithms for Inverse Eigenvalue Problems Arising in Control and Nonnegative Matrices"
Wynita Griggs (2007)	"Stability Results for Feedback Control Systems"
Arvin Dehghani (2007)	"Robust Adaptive Control Schemes"

Clearly, control systems research is relevant to other areas of knowledge, such as systems optimisation, learning systems, discrete-event systems and robotic systems.