Contemporary Trends In Nonlinear Geometric Control Theory And Its Applications

Concerns contemporary trends in nonlinear geometric control theory and its applications.

This volume is the outcome of the first CASY workshop on "Advances in Control Theory and Applications" which was held at University of Bologna on May 22-26, 2006. It consists of selected contributions by some of the invited speakers and contains recent results in control. The volume is intended for engineers, researchers, and students in control engineering.

This book collects a series of contributions addressing the various contexts in which the theory of Lie groups is applied. A preliminary chapter serves the reader both as a basic reference source and as an ongoing thread that runs through the subsequent chapters. From representation theory and Gerstenhaber algebras to control theory, from differential equations to Finsler geometry and Lepage manifolds, the book introduces young researchers in Mathematics to a wealth of different topics, encouraging a multidisciplinary approach to research. As such, it is suitable for students in doctoral courses, and will also benefit researchers who want to expand their field of interest.

The purpose of this fantastically useful book is to lay out an overview on possible tools for state reconstruction in nonlinear systems. Here, basic observability notions and observer structures are recalled, together with ingredients for advanced designs on this basis. The problem of state reconstruction in dynamical systems, known as observer problem, is crucial for controlling or even merely monitoring processes. For linear systems, the theory has been well established for several years, so this book attempts to tackle the problem for non-linear systems.

The purpose of this book is to present a self-contained description of the fun damentals of the theory of nonlinear control systems, with special emphasis on the differential geometric approach. The book is intended as a graduate text as weil as a reference to scientists and engineers involved in the analysis and design of feedback systems. The first version of this book was written in 1983, while I was teach ing at the Department of Systems Science and Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. This new edition integrates my subsequent teaching experience gained at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1987, at the Carl-Cranz Gesellschaft in Oberpfaffenhofen in 1987, at the University of California in Berkeley in 1988. In addition to a major rearrangement of the last two Chapters of the first version, this new edition incorporates two additional Chapters at a more elementary level and an exposition of some relevant research findings which have occurred since 1985.

This volume deals with controllability and observability properties of nonlinear systems, as well as various ways to obtain input-output representations. The emphasis is on fundamental notions as (controlled) invariant distributions and submanifolds, together with algorithms to compute the required feedbacks.