Nonlinear control theory is the area of control theory which deals with systems that are nonlinear, time-variant, or both. Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that is concerned with the behavior of dynamical systems with inputs, and how to modify the output by changes in the input using feedback, feedforward, or signal filtering. The system to be controlled is called the "plant". One way to make the output of a system follow a desired reference signal is to compare the output of the plant to the desired output, and provide feedback to the plant to modify the output to bring it closer to the desired output.
Petar V. Kokotovic is professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He has made contributions in the areas of adaptive control, singular perturbation techniques, and nonlinear control especially the backstepping stabilization method.
Claire Jennifer Tomlin is a British researcher in hybrid systems, distributed and decentralized optimization and control theory and holds the Charles A. Desoer Chair at the University of California, at Berkeley.
Diederich Hinrichsen is a German mathematician who, together with Hans W. Knobloch, established the field of dynamical systems theory and control theory in Germany.
Karl Johan Åström is a Swedish control theorist, who has made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control. In 1965, he described a general framework of Markov decision processes with incomplete information, what ultimately led to the notion of a Partially observable Markov decision process.
Mustafa Tamer Başar is a control and game theorist who is the Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study.
Michael Athans was a Greek-American control theorist and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the IEEE (1973) and a Fellow of the AAAS (1977). He was the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the field of control theory. A pioneer in the field of control theory, he helped shape modern control theory and spearheaded the field of multivariable control system design and the field of robust control. Athans was a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory from 1961 to 1964, and a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty member from 1964 to 1998. Upon retirement, Athans moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he was an Invited Research Professor in the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico where he received a honoris causa doctorate from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 2011.
Miroslav Krstić is an American control theorist and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Krstić is also the director of the Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UCSD and a Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. In the list of eminent researchers in systems and control, he is the youngest.
The IEEE Control Systems Award is a technical field award given to an individual by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science or technology". It is an IEEE-level award, created in 1980 by the board of directors of the IEEE, but sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society.
Anders Gunnar Lindquist is a Swedish applied mathematician and control theorist. He has made contributions to the theory of partial realization, stochastic modeling, estimation and control, and moment problems in systems and control. In particular, he is known for the discovery of the fast filtering algorithms for (discrete-time) Kalman filtering in the early 1970s, and his seminal work on the separation principle of stochastic optimal control and, in collaborations with Giorgio Picci, the Geometric Theory for Stochastic Realization. Together with late Christopher I. Byrnes and Tryphon T. Georgiou, he is one of the founder of the so-called Byrnes-Georgiou-Lindquist school. They pioneered a new moment-based approach for the solution of control and estimation problems with complexity constraints.
Arthur James Krener is an American mathematician. He is a distinguished visiting professor in the department of applied mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has made contributions in the areas of control theory, nonlinear control, and stochastic processes.
Joseph Pierre LaSalle was an American mathematician specialising in dynamical systems and responsible for important contributions to stability theory, such as LaSalle's invariance principle which bears his name.
Daniel M. Liberzon is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Petros A. Ioannou is a Cypriot American Electrical Engineer who made important contributions in Robust Adaptive Control, Vehicle and Traffic Flow Control, and Intelligent Transportation Systems.
The Giorgio Quazza Medal is an award given by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) to a distinguished control engineer, presented at each IFAC Triennial International World Congress. It was established in 1979, as a memorial to the late Giorgio Quazza, a leading Italian electrical and control engineer who served IFAC in many capacities in a most distinguished manner. The award is given for "outstanding lifetime contributions of a researcher and/or engineer to conceptual foundations in the field of systems and control."
In mathematics, zero dynamics is known as the concept of evaluating the effect of zero on systems.
Frank L. Lewis is an American electrical engineer, academic and researcher. He is a professor of electrical engineering, Moncrief-O’Donnell Endowed Chair, and head of Advanced Controls and Sensors Group at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He is a member of UTA Academy of Distinguished Teachers and a charter member of UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars.
Hassan K. Khalil is an Egyptian-born American electrical engineer. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1989 for contributions to singular perturbation theory and its application to control.
Hans-Wilhelm Knobloch was a German mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems and control theory. Although the field of mathematical systems and control theory was already well-established in several other countries, Hans-Wilhelm Knobloch and Diederich Hinrichsen were the two mathematicians of most importance in establishing this field in Germany.
Ali Galip Ulsoy is an academic at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, where he is the C.D. Mote Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and the William Clay Ford Professor Emeritus of Manufacturing.
