Webinar | Control with Time Delays; Challenges and Opportunities by Prof Rifat Sipahi
Abstract
The presence of time delays often causes undesirable outcomes in feedback control systems. Delays in measurements for example prevent the controller to monitor the instantaneous state of the system, and hence control decisions made based on available but delayed information do not always end up being the most appropriate toward properly controlling the system.
Although it may sound counter-intuitive however delays in a control system are not always detrimental, as long as one can engineer the system properly based on the principles of control theory. To this end, one can not only render a system to be insensitive to delays, i.e., the system would work regardless of how large/small the delays are, but can even insert delays intentionally into the controller so that the system behaviour is improved from a dynamical systems perspective.
In this talk, the recent results in this area of time delay systems will be presented, starting with discussions on inherent challenges and opportunities first, and demonstrating next how delays can be utilised in an advantageous way in control. An example from a robotic network coordination system will then be benchmarked to put some of these ideas to test for validation and further discovery.
About the Speaker
Prof Rifat Sipahi received his BS from Technical University of Istanbul in 2000, and MS and PhD degrees respectively in 2002 and 2005 from University of Connecticut, all in mechanical engineering. Under the Chateaubriand scholarship award of the French government, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Universite de Technologie de Compiegne, HeuDiaSyC Labs (CNRS) in France (2005-2006).
In 2006, he joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, where he is currently a professor. His research is in the area of dynamical systems and control, with emphasis on control with time delays and in network settings, and human-machine/human-in-the-loop systems. His research over the past 10 years has been funded primarily by US National Science Foundation and DARPA. He is the recipient of the 2015 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Outstanding Young Investigator Award and a 2011 DARPA Young Faculty Award.
Prof Sipahi has been actively involved in various capacities in conferences organized by ASME, IEEE, and IFAC. He is the author of the book entitled Mastering Frequency Domain Techniques for the Stability Analysis of LTI Time Delay Systems (SIAM 2019).
Prof Sipahi is a Fellow of ASME and Senior member of IEEE. He currently serves as Associate Editor for Automatica.
