Recent Advances in Learning and Control

This volume is composed of invited papers on learning and control. The contents form the proceedings of a workshop held in January 2008, in Hyderabad, that honoured the 60^th birthday of Doctor Mathukumalli Vidyasagar.

The 14 papers, written by international specialists in the field, cover a variety of interests within the broader field of learning and control. The editors have grouped these into the following 3 categories:

• learning and computational issues

• learing for communication and identification

• applications of learning and control

The diversity of the research presented gives the reader a unique opportunity to explore a comprehensive overview of a field of great interest to control and system theorists. Specific topics include: a look at progress toward a unified view of communication and control; a new type of neural computation; a review of 50 years of the Pontryagin maximum principle; the control of smart materials and the uses of monotone systems in systems biology.

The reader will benefit from the expert participants’ ideas on the exciting new approaches to control and system theory and their predictions of future directions for the subject that were discussed at the workshop.

Statistical Learning Theory: A Pack-based Strategy for Uncertain Feasibility and Optimization Problems.- UAV Formation Control: Theory and Application.- Electrical and Mechanical Passive Network Synthesis.- Output Synchronization of Nonlinear Systems with Relative Degree One.- On the Computation of Optimal Transport Maps Using Gradient Flows and Multiresolution Analysis.- Realistic Anchor Positioning for Sensor Localization.- Graph Implementations for Nonsmooth Convex Programs.- When Is a Linear Continuous-time System Easy or Hard to Control in Practice?.- Metrics and Morphing of Power Spectra.- A New Type of Neural Computation.- Getting Mobile Autonomous Robots to Form a Prescribed Geometric Arrangement.- Convex Optimization in Infinite Dimensional Spaces.- The Servomechanism Problem for SISO Positive LTI Systems.- Passivity-based Stability of Interconnection Structures.- Identification of Linear Continuous-time Systems Based on Iterative Learning Control.- A Pontryagin Maximum Principle for Systems of Flows.- Safe Operation and Control of Diesel Particulate Filters Using Level Set Methods.- Robust Control of Smart Material-based Actuators.- Behaviors Described by Rational Symbols and the Parametrization of the Stabilizing Controllers.