ECE 417 Final Projects Info

At the end of the semester, you will need to submit a final project and deliver an oral presentation on it. The presentations will take place during the final exam time for the course: 7:00-10:00 PM, Wednesday, December 17, in the same room where the class regularly meets.

You are responsible for choosing a topic for your final project and discussing it with me as soon as possible, but definitely by mid-October. The following are examples of possible project topics.

Research-based project

Many of you are taking this course because its subject is relevant to your ongoing or future research. The best way to choose a topic for the final project is to align it with your research interests. This will also help you make progress in your research by motivating you to complete a certain amount of work by the end of the semester. It is certainly acceptable for your final project to be preliminary and open-ended. Application-related projects are particularly encouraged. In any case, it is important for you to explain how the material covered in the course is relevant and helpful to your research project.

Here are some examples of past projects.

If you are not yet involved in research, or if your research is totally unrelated to nonlinear and adaptive control (though this is unlikely), then your final project can consist of reading research articles on some relevant topic. This can also be supplemented by conducting simulations and/or trying to come up with original ideas and results. Below are some sample topics with references and links to get you started. I will be adding more things here as the semester goes along. Of course, you should feel free to choose and pursue a topic which interests you and which is not on the list.

Advanced topics in adaptive control

"Universal" regulators. B. Martensson, The order of any stabilizing regulator is sufficient a priori information for adaptive stabilization, Systems Control Lett., 6:87-91, 1985 (Correction: in Systems Control Lett., 20:465-470, 1993). R. Nussbaum, Some remarks on a conjecture in parameter adaptive control, Systems Control Lett., 3:243-246, 1983. C. I. Byrnes and J. C. Willems, Adaptive stabilization of multivariable linear systems, Proc. 23rd IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control, 1984, pages 1574-1577. E. P. Ryan, A universal adaptive stabilizer for a class of nonlinear systems, Systems Control Lett., 16:209-218, 1991.

Switching adaptive control. A. S. Morse. Control using logic-based switching, in A. Isidori, editor, Trends in Control, pages 69-113, Springer, New York, 1995, and the many references therein.

Performance comparison of adaptive control designs. See papers 5, 10, and others on Mark French's homepage.

Persistency of excitation. See the CDC'02 paper by Teel et al. and the references therein. Also references on page 177 of the class textbook.

Linear adaptive control via separate probing and control stages. D. Miller, A new approach to adaptive control: no nonlinearities, Systems Control Lett., 49: 67-79, 2003. D. Miller, A new approach to model reference adaptive control, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, 48:743-757, 2003.

Robust adaptive control. Chapters 8 and 9 of the textbook.

Stochastic adaptive control. T. Duncan and B. Pasik-Duncan, Stochastic adaptive control, The Control Handbook, pages 1127-1136, and the references therein.

Recent advances in adaptive control. See work by A. Ilchmann, E. Ryan, and others.

Adaptive control and biology. The work of E. Sontag and L. Moreau, see Eduardo Sontag's homepage.

Other topics

Stability of slowly-time varying systems. V. Solo, On the stability of slowly time-varying linear systems, Math. Control Signals Systems, 7:331-350, 1994, and the references therein.

LaSalle's principle for time-varying systems. There is work by many people: D. Aeyels, Z. Artstein, references in the book H. Khalil, Nonlinear Systems, Prentice Hall, in the paper J. Hespanha, Uniform stability of switched linear systems: extensions of LaSalle's Invariance Principle, in the paper Y. Orlov, Extended invariance principle for nonautonomous switched systems, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, 48: 1448-1452, 2003.

Dynamical systems and algorithms. M. Chu, On the continuous realization of iterative processes, SIAM Review, 30:375-387, 1988. R. W. Brockett, Dynamical systems that sort lists, diagonalize matrices, and solve linear programming problems, Linear Algebra and its Applications, 146:79-91, 1991.

If you're interested in one of the above topics but have trouble locating references, let me know.