ROBUSTNESS TECHNIQUES
FOR CONTROL OF UNCERTAIN SYSTEMS
 

Abstract. The research program regards two strictly related research areas: robust control and control oriented identification. While the former area has reached a certain degree of maturity, the latter is undergoing a fast evolution with a growing interest in the community, thus generating a renewed and deep interest in robust control. The main purpose of the project is to contribute to the ongoing process of integration of the two research areas. This will be done by providing scientific results on both methodological and applied aspects, with the aim of enlightening and exploiting the synergy between approaches and techniques developed in the respective areas of interest. The main objectives of the project are:

1. To contribute to the progress of the state of the art in the areas of robust control and control oriented identification. On one side, the project aims at developing advanced techniques for the identification of an `optimal' model of the system and the estimation of the associated model error. This information is vital for the design of robust control laws. On a different side, the project intends to investigate new techniques for the design of robust controllers, which guarantee the achievement of high performances by using the information delivered by control oriented identification schemes.
2. To verify whether the developed innovative techniques allow for a real reduction of the gap between theory and practice, in the sense that they permit to tackle real problems in important applicative fields like industrial plant control and mobile robotics.
3. To coordinate several Italian research teams that are active in closely related research areas. On this side, considerable attention will be devoted to the training of young researchers in the automatic control field, through the organization of working meetings, visit exchanges and an intense seminarial activity within the research groups involved in the project and their international collaborators. In order to achieve the outlined objectives, the project gathers the expertise of 6 research teams, with long standing records of scientific achievements, as shown by their publications, international collaborations and management activities carried out in Editorial Boards and Technical Boards of the highest standing international journals and conferences.