Dynamical Systems Seminar

Understanding actuation mechanisms, sensing systems, and behavior patterns of humans has been a subject of scientific inquiry for centuries. The brain is arguably the most important organ in the human body. It controls and coordinates actions and reactions, allows us to think and feel, and enables us to have memories and feelings-all the things that make us human. In most applications, controllers are not designed after humans. In general, unique applications in controls require custom controller designs based on systems information. This becomes problematic when there are un-modeled disturbances and/or full knowledge of the system dynamics is not available, etc., if we can mimic human behavior, this allows us to adaptively learn the control law without a priori knowledge about the system dynamics. To mimic human behavior, we must explore methods that can adapt to unknown environments with minimal system information. However, limitations include insufficient data a priori, computational complexity of learning algorithms, and lack of methods for real-time implementation of said algorithms, etc. We will overcome these challenges by considering real-time learning-based methods. I will present the Emotional Learning and Neural Network (-based) approaches for utilization in real-time control of unknown dynamical systems. Specifically, we will demonstrate applications in Robotic, Power Systems, and Process Industries.