by Prof. James Lam, Mechanical Engineering
Mar 14, 2016
The State Natural Science Award aims to reward citizens and organisations that have made outstanding contributions to scientific and technological progress. The award to Professor James Lam in 2015 was based on the collaborative project entitled "The Parametric Designs for Constrained Control Systems — Theory and Applications" headed by Professor Guang-Ren Duan of Harbin Institute of Technology, other team members include Professors Guo-Ping Liu, Bin Zhou, and Ai-Guo Wu.
The project was concerned with the control synthesis of control systems subjected to input constraints, state constraints and communication constraints. These constraints make control systems design very challenging. Control systems design without considering these issues may lead to performance degradation and even instability of the practical systems. Conventional approaches cannot deal with such design problems systematically and satisfactorily. To overcome this shortcoming, the project proposed a systematic parametric approach to designing of constrained control systems, which establishes global, semi-global, and local stabilizing control laws for input constrained systems based on parametric Lyapunov equations and a new convex hull treatment of saturation nonlinearity. Moreover, by adopting the idea of predictive control and using the feedback gains for control systems as the design parameters, parametric design approaches have been developed for control systems with communication constraints manifested as packet dropouts and time delays.
