A typical urban traffic network is a complicated large-scale stochastic system which consists of many interconnected signalized traffic intersections. Thls paper develops a decentralized real-time adaptive control strategy for the traffic networks based on Markov decision theory. Computer simulation results of this new approach on a five intersection traffic network indicate significant improve...

Most of MEMS devices are actuated using electrostatic forces. Parallel or lateral plate actuators are the types commonly used. Nevertheless, electrostatic actuation has some limitations due to its non-linear nature. This work presents a methodic overview of the existing techniques applied to the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) electrostatic actuation modeling and their implications to t...

Precision mirrors are required for effective solar energy collectors. Manufacturing such mirrors and making them robust to disturbances such as thermal gradients is expensive. In this paper, the use of parallel binary actuation to control the shape of mirrors for solar concentrators is explored. The approach embeds binary actuators in a compliant mirror substructure. Actuators are deployed in a...

This paper focuses on a new geometric approach to (fully actuated) control systems on the sphere. The control laws exploit the basic and intuitive notions of geodesic direction and distance between points, and generalize the classical proportional plus derivative feedback (PD) without the need of arbitrary local coordinate charts. The stability analysis relies on an appropriate Lyapunov functio...

We present a variant of the model introduced by Vogel and Yang [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A23, 1074 (2006)] for point-actuated deformable mirrors (DMs) with continuous facesheets, and we describe a robust efficient regularized- output least-squares computational scheme to estimate the parameters in the model, given noisy discrete observations of the DM response to known actuation. We demonstrate the eff...

A system of partial differential equations describing the spatial oscillations of an Euler-Bernoulli beam with a tip mass is considered. The linear system considered is actuated by two independent controls and separated into a pair of differential equations in a Hilbert space. A feedback control ensuring strong stability of the equilibrium in the sense of Lyapunov is proposed. The proof of the ...

We show that a finite dimensional strictly passive linear controller exponentially stabilizes a large class of partial differential equations which are actuated through its boundaries on a one dimensional spatial domain. This is achieved by extending existing results on exponential stability of boundary control system with static boundary control to the case with dynamic boundary control. The a...

The intrinsically underactuated and nonlinear nature of continuum soft robots makes the derivation provably stable feedback control laws a challenging task. Most works so far circumvented issue either by looking at coarse fully-actuated approximations dynamics or imposing quasi-static assumptions. In this letter, we move step in direction controlling generic taking explicitly into account their...