Daniel Liberzon

Meeting the Need for Robustified Nonlinear System Theory Concepts

Dainel Liberzon

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In this talk we will give an overview of our recent work on formulating and studying robustified versions of some concepts from nonlinear system theory. The original concepts are standard ones, such as the observability and minimum-phase properties. We call our versions robustified because rather than focusing on some ideal behavior (such as the output being identically zero) they capture possibly large deviations from this behavior and the resulting response of the system. These concepts are based on the framework of input-to-state stability, which is a robustified version of global asymptotic stability under zero inputs.

Our motivation for studying these concepts comes from several analysis and synthesis problems of current interest. These include stability of switched systems and control with limited information. Some advances on these problems which directly utilize the above concepts will be described in the talk.

Daniel Liberzon

Daniel Liberzon was a student in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University from 1989 to 1993 and received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Brandeis University in 1998 (under the supervision of Prof. Roger W. Brockett of Harvard University). Following a postdoctoral position in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University from 1998 to 2000, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a research associate professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Dr. Liberzon's research interests include nonlinear control theory, analysis and synthesis of switched systems, control with limited information, and uncertain and stochastic systems. He is the author of the book "Switching in Systems and Control". Dr. Liberzon currently serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is a recipient of the IFAC Young Author Prize (2002), the NSF CAREER Award (2002), and the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council (2007).