American Automatic Control Council Research Articles

Challenges and opportunities facing game theory and control: an interview with Tamer Başar.

The Control community has recently witnessed an almost exponentially growing interest in the application of game-theoretic concepts and tools in research on control, multi-agent systems, and networks. In an interview with NSR, Professor Tamer Başar, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Swanlund Endowed Chair and CAS Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, former president of both the IEEE Control Systems Society and the American Automatic Control Council, and the founding president of the International Society of Dynamic Games, talked about the recently emerging role of game theory in control and networking research, how it broadens the territorial boundaries of control into disciplines outside engineering, and opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

John S. Baras [People in Control

In this issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine, we have interviews with John S. Baras, the 2017 recipient of the American Automatic Control Council (A2C2) Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award; Jacquelien M.A. Scherpen, who presented one of the semiplenaries at the 2017 American Control Conference (ACC); and Ketan Savla, the 2017 recipient of the A2C2 Donald P. Eckman Award.

American Control Conference Crosses the Border! [Conference Reports

The author provides an overview of the 2012 American Control Conference (ACC). The ACC is the annual conference of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC), the US national member organization (NMO) of the International Federation of Automatic Control, Montreal, PQ, (IFAC). AACC is an association of the control-related groups of eight member societies: AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers), ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers), ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), IEEE, ISA (International Society of Automation), SCS (Society for Computer Simulation), and SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics). ACC 2012 also benefited from the support of IFAC, the Canadian NMO for IFAC. ACC 2012 featured an intensive program of regular, invited, and tutorial technical sessions; preconference workshops; special sessions over lunch and in the evenings; and social events with excellent food, unlimited drinks, and music performed by professionals as well as conference attendees.

Acceptance Speech of Arthur J. Krener for the 2012 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award [People in Control

In this issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine (CSM), this column ends with Arthur Krener's acceptance speech for the 2012 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award given in Montréal, Canada, in June 2012. He is a mathematician whose research interests are in developing methods for the control and estimation of nonlinear dynamical systems and stochastic processes. In 1971 he received the Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis (UCD). He retired from UCD in 2006 as a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and he currently is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University, Imperial College, NASA Ames Research Center, the University of Paris, the University of Maryland, the University of Padua, North Carolina State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Honors and awards include Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Life Fellow of the IEEE, the W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize in Mathematics from SIAM, the IEEE Control System Society Bode Prize Lecture, and the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council.

ACC 2013 in Washington, D.C. [ACC Preview

The author provides an overview of the upcoming 2013 American Control Conference (ACC). ACC will be held in Washington, D.C. Monday through Wednesday, 17-19 June 2013, with workshops being planned for the Saturday and Sunday (15?16 June 2013) beforehand. The ACC is the annual conference of the American Automatic Control Council [AACC, the United States national member organization of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)]. The eight national and international society cosponsors of the ACC include the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the IEEE, the International Society of Automation (ISA), the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The technical program will feature theme tracks in sustainability, societal challenges for control, and smart healthcare systems. Each theme will include a semiplenary and special track, including tutorial and invited sessions. In addition to the special themes, the conference technical, (semi-)plenary, and special sessions will reflect the diversity of theory and applications of control that is one of the hallmarks of an ACC.

Remembering Donald P. Eckman (1915–1962) [Historical Perspectives

During this period in which the IEEE Control Systems Society and the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) celebrates more than 50 years of successful service to the control community, one of the names best known to members of these organizations is that of Donald P. Eckman. The Eckman Award recognizes outstanding young contributors to the control field and is the oldest AACC award. Probably less well known are the contributions of Donald Eckman himself and the nature of the man for whom the award is named.

American Control Conference 2011 [Conference Reports

The 2011 American Control Conference (ACC) was held at the Hilton San Francisco, California, from Wednesday, June 29, through Friday, July 1, 2011, with preconference workshops on Tuesday, June 28. The conference was supported by the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). There were 1409 papers submitted as either regular contributions or invited papers. Of these, 901 appeared in the conference proceedings for an acceptance rate of 64%. Of these, 182 papers were in the invited paper category, of which 150 were accepted. The conference registration, both advance and on site, exceeded 1200 participants. There were over 300 students attending and nonmember registration exceeded 175.

Phase space reconstruction using input-output time series data.

In this paper we suggest that an extension of a procedure recently proposed by Wayland et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, 580 (1993)] for recognizing determinism in an autonomous time series can also be used as a diagnostic for determining an appropriate embedding dimension for driven ("input-output") systems. We compare the results of this extension to the results produced by the extensions to the method of false nearest neighbors put forward by Rhodes and Morari [Proceedings of the American Control Conference, Seattle, edited by The American Automatic Control Council (IEEE, Piscataway, 1995)] and the method of averaged false nearest neighbors by Cao et al. [Int. J. Bifurcation Chaos 8, 1491 (1998)].

Instrumentation analysis using parameter estimation of simulated data

References 1 Bayo, E., A Finite-Element Approach to Control the End-Point Motion of Single-Link Flexible Robot, Journal of Robotic Vol. 4, No. 1, 1987, pp. 63-75. Devasia, S., and Paden, B., Exact Tracking for Nonlinear TimeVarying Systems, Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Lake Buena Vista, FL), IEEE Control Systems Society, New York, 1994, pp. 2346-2355. Paden, B., Chen, D., Ledesma, R., and Bayo, E., Exponentially Stable Tracking Control for Multi-Joint Flexible Manipulators, Journal of Dynamic Measurement and Control, Vol. 115, March 1993, pp. 53-59. Martin, P., Devasia, S., and Paden, B., A Different Look at Tracking: Control of a VTOL Aircraft, Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Lake Buena Vista, FL), IEEE Control Systems Society, New York, 1994, pp. 2376-2381. Tomlin, C., Lygeros, J., and Shastri, S., Output Tracking for a Nonminimum Phase Dynamic CTOL Aircraft Model, Proceedings of the 34th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (New Orleans, LA), IEEE Control Systems Society, New York, 1995, pp. 1867-1872. Singer, N. C., and Seering, W. P., Command Inputs to Reduce System Vibration, Journal of Dynamic Measurement and Control, Vol. 112, March 1990, pp. 76-82. Smith, O. J. M., Feedback Control McGraw-Hill, New York, 1958. Singer, N. C., and Seering, W. P., Using Acausal Shaping Techniques to Reduce Robot Vibration, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 3, IEEE Control Systems Society, New York, 1988, pp. 1434-1439. Chun, H. M., Turner, J. D., and Juang, J., Disturbance-Accommodating Tracking Maneuvers of Flexible Spacecraft, Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1985, pp. 197-216. Cook, G., Discussion: Preshaping Command Inputs to Reduce System Vibration, Journal of Dynamic Measurement and Control, Vol. 115, June 1993, pp. 309, 310. Kwon, D., and Book, W. J., Inverse Dynamic Method Yielding Flexible Manipulator State Trajectories, Proceedings of the American Control Conference, American Automatic Control Council, New York, 1990, pp. 186-193. Isidori, A., Nonlinear Control Systems: An Introduction, SpringerVerlag, New York, 1989.

1995 AACC Awards

Four awards were presented by the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) at the Awards Banquet of the American Control Conference in Seattle, June 22, 1995. Each of these awards represents a great honor conferred for unusual professional distinction.

Biographies of the American Automatic Control Council Awardees 1995

Biographies of the American Automatic Control Council Awardees 1995

1991 Awards of the American Automatic Control Council

1991 Awards of the American Automatic Control Council

American automatic control council awards

American automatic control council awards

Interview with the president of the american automatic control council

Interview with the president of the american automatic control council

American automatic control council awards

American automatic control council awards

American automatic control council awards

American automatic control council awards

High Priority Research Relevant to Energy Issues in the Field of Process and Systems Dynamics and Control

This paper summarizes a set of high priority basic engineering research needs in the field of Process and Systems Dynamics and Control which are important to the development of future energy technologies. These needs have been defined and recommended to the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the direction and oversight of the American Automatic Control Council representing the major professional societies having expertise in the field. Ten generic research areas have been defined which are grouped within four major recommended fields of basic engineering research: on-line optimization and control, systems methodology, measurement methodology and instrumentation, and modeling. Research in each of these fields has the potential for broad energy impact in transportation, processing, energy conversion and delivery, manufacturing, environmental aspects and other applications which consume significant amounts of energy. It is estimated that the recommended research could result in savings of total energy use of 1–10 percent depending on the application, which at current prices could range from $5 to $50 billion per year, based on research funding of $20 to $30 million per year. The results and recommendations summarized in this paper are based on the report entitled, “Basic Research in Engineering: Process and Systems Dynamics and Control” [1].

Formal post-graduate education in automatic control in the United States

American educational institutions have developed an approach to post graduate education which is not common in the rest of the world. This paper reviews the American system of education in automatic control beyond the baccalaureate degree and discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of this system. In 1969 the Education Committee of the American Automatic Control Council surveyed American educational institutions offering advanced degrees with specialization in automatic control. Some of the facts in the present paper were obtained from this source. A summary of the survey may be found in the author's Ref. 1.

The International Federation of Automatic Control

The initials IFAC, standing for the International Federation of Automatic Control, are appearing more and more in the control systems literature these days. It is appropriate that readers of these TRAHSACTIONS be more fully aware of this organization in which they participate through the IRE's membership in the American Automatic Control Council. What are IFAC's purposes, who are its members, how does it operate, what has it accomplished? Now, after two years of existence for IFAC, these data are better known and have more significance.

The American Automatic Control Council

An international meeting of automatic control was held in Heidelberg, Germany, September 25–29, 1956, under the auspices of the joint control Committee of the German electrical and mechanical engineering societies. This committee is known as the VDI/VDE — Fachgruppe Regelungstechnik. Other international meetings on automatic control had been held previously. On July 16–21, 1951, one took place in Cranfield, England. This was called the “Conference on Automatic Control.” It was followed by the “Frequency Response Symposium” in New York City, December 1–2, 1953. The Heidelberg meetings were such a success that a demand arose for an international federation which could assist the host country in the matter of publicity, securing papers, and other aspects of the organization of future international control meetings.