Event

CDS Invited Lecture: William Levine, "Optimal Control and the Design of Feedback Controls"

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
3:00 p.m.
Main Lecture Hall, Kim Building
Pam White
301 405 6576
pwhite@umd.edu

Control and Dynamical Systems Invited Lecture Series
Optimal Control and the Design of Feedback Controls

William Levine
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Affiliate Faculty Member, Institute for Systems Research
University of Maryland

Abstract
While the design of feedback controls for linear time-invariant (LTI) single-input single-output (SISO) systems is very well understood, any departure from this situation typically results in a design problem for which there is surprisingly little theoretical support. Beginning with the optimal output feedback regulator, a number of attempts to improve this situation by developing theoretical and analytical tools for controller design will be described. Another way to understand design is by analysis of successful designs. Several examples of successful designs, drawn from biology as well as technology, will be described and analyzed. Some open and important problems related to analytic and theoretical aspects of control design will also be presented.

Biography
William S. Levine received his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph. D. degrees from M. I. T. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Throughout his career he has specialized in the design and analysis of control systems and related problems in estimation, filtering, and system modeling. He has published over 100 articles on these and related topics. He has supervised 22 completed Ph. D. and 29 completed M. S. theses.

He is the co-author of Using MATLAB to Analyze and Design Control Systems, published by Benjamin/Cummings, March 1992. Second Edition, March 1995. He is the editor of The Control Handbook, published by CRC Press (in cooperation with IEEE Press), February 1996. The Control Handbook was named best engineering handbook published in 1996 by the Assoc. of American Publishers. He is the co-editor of The Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control Systems, published by Birkhauser in 2005. He is the editor of a series on control engineering for Birkhauser.

He is the current past President of the American Automatic Control Council, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and has been President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He and his collaborators received the Schroers Award for outstanding rotorcraft research in 1998 for their work on computer-aided design of rotorcraft control systems. He and another group of collaborators received the award for outstanding paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control for their paper entitled “Discrete Time Point Processes in Urban Traffic Queue Estimation.”

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