Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre was awarded the 2020 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society at the Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (virtual) awards ceremony.
The IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award recognises outstanding papers relating to theory, design, and applications of control engineering.
The design of robust feedback controllers by convex optimisation tools is a classical topic of control theory, and this formed the subject of Professor Sepulchre’s award-winning paper.
The state-of-the art methodology is called H-infinity control (incidentally, the Control Group in Cambridge played a key role in the development of that methodology in the early 1990s). Until now, H-infinity control has been applied to the design of systems operating around a stable equilibrium, using linear models.
In a new development, the article proposes to leverage that methodology to the design of nonlinear systems that operate away from equilibrium, allowing for the robust control of switching of oscillating behaviours.
The research is primarily motivated by bio-inspired engineering applications that include the design of legged mechanical robots or electrical neuromorphic spiking circuits.
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