Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Adaptive control problems arise in many engineering applications in which one needs to design feedback controllers that ensure tracking of desired reference trajectories while at the same time identify unknown parameters such as control gains. This talk will summarize the speaker's work on adaptive tracking and parameter identification, including an application to curve tracking problems in robotics. The talk will be understandable to those familiar with the basic theory of ordinary differential equations. No prerequisite background in systems and control will be needed to understand and appreciate this talk.

We will present the "a-posteriori" approach to KAM theory.

We formulate an invariance equation and show that an approximate-enough solution which verifies some non-degeneracy conditions leads to a solution.  Note that this does not have any reference to integrable systems and that the non-degeneracy conditions are not global properties of the system, but only properties of the solution. The "automatic reducibility" allows to take advantage of the geometry to develop very efficient Newton methods and show that they converge.

This leads to very efficient numerical  algorithms (which moreover can be proved to lead to correct solutions), to validate formal expansions. From a more theoretical point of view, it can be applied to other geometric contexts (conformally symplectic, presymplectic) and other geometric objects such as whiskered tori. One can deal well with degenerate systems, singular perturbation theory and obtain simple proofs of monogenicity and Whitney regularity.

This is joint work with many people.

The Neumann-Poincaré (NP) operator arises in boundary value problems, and plays an important role in material design, signal amplification, particle detection, etc. The spectrum of the NP operator on domains with corners was studied by Carleman before tools for rigorous discussion were created, and received a lot of attention in the past ten years. In this talk, I will present our discovery and verification of eigenvalues embedded in the continuous spectrum of this operator. The main ideas are decoupling of spaces by symmetry and construction of approximate eigenvalues. This is based on two works with Stephen Shipman and Karl-Mikael Perfekt.