Designing controllers from data via approximate nonlinearity cancellation

Professor Claudio De Persis, Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen and Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control

Abstract:

We present a technique to control nonlinear systems whose dynamics are unknown. The technique is based on collecting input-state data of low complexity from the system and using them to design a controller which aims at stabilizing the linear part of the dynamics while approximately cancelling the nonlinearities. The design is reduced to the solution of a data-dependent semi-definite program. The method also provides an estimate of the region of attraction of the closed-loop system. The correctness of the design in the presence of noise on the dataset can be formally assessed.

Biography:Bio: Claudio De Persis received the the Ph.D. degree in System Engineering in 2000 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy. He is currently a Professor at the Engineering and Technology Institute, Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is also affiliated with the Jan Willems Center for Systems and Control. Previously he was with the Department of Mechanical Automation and Mechatronics, University of Twente and with the Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, University of Rome "La Sapienza". He was a Research Associate at the Department of Systems Science and Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, in 2000-2001, and at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, in 2001-2002. His main research interest is in control theory, and his recent research focuses on dynamical networks, cyberphysical systems, smart grids and resilient control. He was an Editor of the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (2006-2013), an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (2010-2015), and of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2012- 2015). He is currently an Associate Editor of Automatica (2013-present) and of IEEE Control Systems Letters (2017-present).