| NSF Org: |
ECCS Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 12, 2011 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | February 7, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1102348 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Radhakisan Baheti
ECCS Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2011 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2015 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $324,439.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $340,439.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2014 = $16,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
202 HIMES HALL BATON ROUGE LA US 70803-0001 (225)578-2760 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
202 HIMES HALL BATON ROUGE LA US 70803-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EPCN-Energy-Power-Ctrl-Netwrks |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
Objective: This project will develop cutting edge stabilization and tracking methods for important classes of deterministic nonlinear control problems that ensure good controller performance under uncertainty or time delays. The work will include engineering applications that will guide the research and ensure the practical usefulness of the results. One application will be to a delayed model of neuromuscular electrical stimulation, which is a technique that has the potential to help restore function to patients with neurological disorders. Another will be to experimental real time implementation of surface or underwater autonomous vehicles in collaboration with Fumin Zhang from Georgia Tech.
Intellectual Merit: Delays and uncertainty are common in chemical process control, combustion, networked systems, teleoperation, and other areas because of modeling uncertainty, sensor designs, time consuming information processing, and transport phenomena, but they are often ignored to simplify the analysis or because the delays are short. In practice, many controllers typically perform well under small uncertainty, but rigorous analysis is needed to understand how the disturbances impact performance, and how big the delays and disturbances can be before stability is destroyed. This project will address these crucial issues using adaptive or delayed controllers that respect the bounds that often arise in applications.
Broader Impacts: The project will combine the PI's mathematical approaches with the work of his engineering collaborators. This will increase the control engineering community's understanding of more rigorous methods. While the applications will focus on neuromuscular electrical stimulation and marine vehicles, we anticipate that the work will be general enough to eventually apply to other areas where time delays are important, such as aerospace and mechanical engineering. The project will also promote interdisciplinary learning. The work will be carried out at an institution that attracts many minorities, and special efforts will be made to recruit students from under- represented groups.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project provided transformative research findings in systems and controls, which is an important area at the interface of applied mathematics and engineering. The area analyzes and designs methods for influencing the behavior of dynamic systems, to achieve some predefined objective. This involves feedbacks, which typically use measurements of a system's own state to adjust the actions taken by the system. Feedbacks are useful for producing robust performance in self-regulating systems and therefore are ubiquitous in engineering. Robustness is important for compensating for uncertainties in mathematical models of dynamical systems or in the effects of the controllers, so robustness is a desirable feature to ensure the effectiveness of control designs. The time delays in this project can model latencies in engineering processes, as well as cases where the current state of the system may not be available for measurement, which lead to the use of time delayed values of the state in the feedbacks. In addition to its cutting edge mathematical theory that ensures robust control performance, the project applied control theory to several complex engineering models that are of compelling ongoing research interest, including controllers that can help autonomous robots track desired paths, as well as feedbacks for neuromuscular electrical stimulation, which is an emerging technique that has the potential to help restore mobility in patients with mobility disorders. The results were broadly disseminated in major control engineering journals and presented in seminars and other lectures in engineering and mathematics departments, as well as at important control engineering conferences. The project also helped train a diverse, qualified cadre of students, including PhD students from both engineering and mathematics, as well as two NSF-supported Research Experiences for Undergraduates students. This provided innovative cross cutting educational opportunities that would not otherwise have been available in the students' standard engineering or mathematics curricula.
Last Modified: 11/30/2015
Modified by: Michael A Malisoff
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