Control and Dynamical Systems: Invited Speaker Series 1996

Institute for Systems Research
University of Maryland at College Park

Introduction
Schedule
Abstracts
Biographies

Introduction

The Invited Speaker Series is designed to bring researchers at the forefront of their respective specialties to the local region to permit the exchange of ideas on the latest advances in those fields with anyone who is interested. Each speaker is invited and funded by the department's research group in that field, thus ensuring that the individuals are well-known by their peers and that their work is significant in that area.

Schedule

Wednesday Feb 28, 1:30pm: Geometry and Nonlinear Control, 300 Years After Johann Bernoulli's Brachistochrone Problem; Hector J. Sussmann, Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University; A.V. Williams Building, Room 2460 (EE Conference Room); Host: P.S. Krishnaprasad

Abstracts

Geometry and Nonlinear Control, 300 Years After Johann Bernoulli's Brachistochrone Problem

Speaker: Hector J. Sussmann
Date: Feb 28, 1996
Host: P.S. Krishnaprasad

In 1696, Johann Bernoulli challenged the mathematical community by proposing the "brachistochrone problem". This event is often taken to mark the birth of the Calculus of Variations, but Bernoulli's question was in fact the first optimal control problem ever studied. On the 300th anniversary of the birth of optimal control, we illustrate the power of the methods of modern optimal control theory, especially when coupled with differential-geometric ideas and tools, by means of a number of examples, including the brachistochrone problem, as well as more recent problems such as that of the equivalence of a control system to linear one, that of the structure of optimal trajectories, and the Markov-Dubins-Reeds-Shepp problem on shortest paths subject to a curvature constraint.

Biographies

Hector J. Sussmann

Hector J. Sussmann was born in 1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his M.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires in 1996 and his Ph.D in Mathematics from New York University in 1969. He was a research fellow in Decision and Control at Harvard University (1970-71), and then taught at the University of Chicago (1971-72). Since 1972 he hs been with Rutgers University , in New Bruswick, NJ, where he is presently aprofessor of Mathematics. He has given invited addresses at several national and international conferences, such as the 1978 International Congres of Mathematics (Helsinki), the 1989 MTNS ( Amsterdam), the 1989 NOLCOS ( Capri, Italy), the 1991 winter meeting of the American MAthematical Society (San Fransisco), and the 1992 25thanniversary meeting of the INRIA (Paris). He is the author of more than 140 research papers in nonlinear and optimal control, and mathematical problems of robotics and neural networks. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was a member of the Council of the American MAthematical Society (1981-1984), and has served in the editorial boards of several mathematics journals. He chaired the 1992-1993 Control Theory Year at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota.