Control in an Information Rich World
Report of the Panel on Future Directions in
Control, Dynamics, and Systems
30 June 2002
Abstract
The field of
control
provides the principles and methods used to design engineering
systems that maintain desirable performance by automatically adapting to changes
in the environment. Over the last forty years the field has seen huge advances, lever-
aging technology improvements in sensing and computation with breakthroughs in
the underlying principles and mathematics. Control systems now play critical roles
in many fields, including manufacturing, electronics, communications, transporta-
tion, computers and networks, and many military systems.
As we begin the 21st Century, the opportunities to apply control principles and
methods are exploding. Computation, communication and sensing are becoming
increasingly inexpensive and ubiquitous, with more and more devices including
embedded processors, sensors, and networking hardware. This will make possible
the development of machines with a degree of intelligence and reactivity that will
influence nearly every aspect of life on this planet, including not just the products
available, but the very environment in which we live.
New developments in this increasingly information rich world will require a
significant expansion of the basic tool sets of control. The complexity of the control
ideas involved in the operation of the Internet, semi-autonomous command and
control systems, and enterprise-wide supply chain management, for example, are
on the boundary of what can be done with available methods. Future applications
in aerospace and transportation, information and networks, robotics and intelligent
machines, biology and medicine, and materials and processing will create systems
that are well beyond our current levels of complexity, and new research is required
to enable such developments.
The purpose of this report is to spell out some of the prospects for control
in the current and future technological environment, to describe the role the field
will play in military, commercial, and scientific applications over the next decade,
and to recommend actions required to enable new breakthroughs in engineering and
technology through application of control research.
ii
iii
Panel Membership
Richard M. Murray (chair)
California Institute of Technology
Karl J.
̊
Astr ̈
om
Lund Institute of Technology
Pramod P. Khargonekar
University of Florida
Stephen P. Boyd
Stanford University
P. R. Kumar
University of Illinois
Siva S. Banda
Air Force Research Laboratory
P. S. Krishnaprasad
University of Maryland
Roger W. Brockett
Harvard University
Greg J. McRae
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
John A. Burns
Virginia Tech
Jerrold E. Marsden
California Institute of Technology
Munzer A. Dahleh
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
George Meyer
NASA Ames Research Center
John C. Doyle
California Institute of Technology
William F. Powers
Ford Motor Company
John Guckenheimer
Cornell University
Gunter Stein
Honeywell International
Charles J. Holland
Department of Defense
Pravin Varaiya
University of California, Berkeley
Additional Contributors
Richard Albanese, Jim Batterson, Richard Braatz, Dennis Bernstein, Joel
Burdick, Raffaello D’Andrea, Michael Dickinson, Frank Doyle, Martha Gallivan,
Jonathan How, Marc Jacobs, Jared Leadbetter, Jesse Leitner, Steven Low, Hideo
Mabuchi, Dianne Newman, Shankar Sastry, John Seinfeld, Eduardo Sontag, Anna
Stefanopoulou, Allen Tannenbaum, Claire Tomlin, Kevin Wise
iv
Contents
Preface
vii
1
Executive Summary
1
2
Overview of the Field
7
2.1
WhatisControl? .......................... 7
2.2
ControlSystemExamples ..................... 13
2.3
The Increasing Role of Information-Based Systems
....... 18
2.4
Opportunities and Challenges Facing the Field
.......... 20
3
Applications, Opportunities, and Challenges
27
3.1
Aerospace and Transportation
................... 29
3.2
Information and Networks
..................... 39
3.3
Robotics and Intelligent Machines . .
............... 49
3.4
Biology and Medicine
........................ 58
3.5
Materials and Processing
...................... 65
3.6
Other Applications
......................... 72
4
Education and Outreach
79
4.1
The New Environment for Control Education
.......... 79
4.2
MakingControlMoreAccessible.................. 81
4.3
Broadening Control Education
................... 83
4.4
The Opportunities in K-12 Math and Science Education
.... 84
4.5
Other Opportunities and Trends . . .
............... 85
5
Recommendations
89
5.1
Integrated Control, Computation, Communications
....... 89
5.2
Control of Complex Decision Systems
............... 90
5.3
High-Risk, Long-Range Applications of Control
......... 91
5.4
Support for Theory and Interaction with Mathematics
..... 92
5.5
New Approaches to Education and Outreach
........... 93
5.6
ConcludingRemarks ........................ 94
A
NSF/CSS Workshop on Education
97
v
vi
Contents
Bibliography
101
Index
105
Preface
This report documents the findings and recommendations of the Panel on
Future Directions in Control, Dynamics, and Systems. This committee was formed
in April 2000 under initial sponsorship of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research
(AFOSR) to provide a renewed vision of future challenges and opportunities in
the field, along with recommendations to government agencies, universities, and
research organizations to ensure continued progress in areas of importance to the
industrial and defense base. The intent of this report is to raise the overall visibility
of research in control, highlight its importance in applications of national interest,
and indicate some of the key trends that are important for continued vitality of the
field.
The Panel was chaired by Professor Richard Murray (Caltech) and was formed
with the help of an organizing committee consisting of Professor Roger Brock-
ett (Harvard), Professor John Burns (VPI), Professor John Doyle (Caltech) and
Dr. Gunter Stein (Honeywell). The remaining Panel members are Karl
̊
Astr ̈
om
(Lund Institute of Technology), Siva Banda (Air Force Research Lab), Stephen
Boyd (Stanford), Munzer Dahleh (MIT), John Guckenheimer (Cornell), Charles
Holland (DDR&E), Pramod Khargonekar (University of Florida), P. R. Kumar
(University of Illinois), P. S. Krishnaprasad (University of Maryland), Greg McRae
(MIT), Jerrold Marsden (Caltech), George Meyer (NASA), William Powers (Ford),
and Pravin Varaiya (UC Berkeley). A writing subcommittee consisting of Karl
̊
Astr ̈
om, Stephen Boyd, Roger Brockett, John Doyle, Richard Murray and Gunter
Stein helped coordinate the generation of the report.
The Panel held a meeting on 16-17 July 2000 at the University of Maryland,
College Park to discuss the state of the field and its future opportunities. The
meeting was attended by members of the Panel and invited participants from the
academia, industry, and government. Additional meetings and discussions were held
over the next 15 months, including presentations at DARPA and AFOSR sponsored
workshops, meetings with government program managers, and writing committee
meetings. The results of these meetings, combined with discussions among Panel
members and within the community at workshops and conferences, form the main
basis for the findings and recommendations of this Panel.
A web site has been established to provide a central repository for materials
generated by the Panel:
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/cdspanel/
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Preface
Copies of this report, links to other sources of information, and presentation mate-
rials from the Panel workshop and other meetings can be found there.
Several similar reports and papers highlighting future directions in control
came to the Panel’s attention during the development of this report. Many mem-
bers of the Panel and participants in the June 2000 workshop were involved in
the generation of the 1988 Fleming report [15] and a 1987
IEEE Transactions on
Automatic Control
article [25], both of which provided a roadmap for many of the
activities of the last decade and continue to be relevant. More recently, the Euro-
pean Commission sponsored a workshop on future control systems [14] and several
other more focused workshops have been held over the last several years [1, 2, 33, 34].
Several recent papers and reports highlighted successes of control [35] and new vis-
tas in control [11, 23]. The Panel also made extensive use of a recent NSF/CSS
report on future directions in control engineering education [1], which provided a
partial basis for Chapter 4 of the present report.
The bulk of this report was written before the tragic events of September 11,
2001, but control will clearly play a major role in the world’s effort to combat terror-
ism. From new methods for command and control of unmanned vehicles, to robust
networks linking businesses, transportation systems, and energy infrastructure, to
improved techniques for sensing and detection of biological and chemical agents, the
techniques and insights from control will enable new methods for protecting human
life and safeguarding our society.
The Panel would like to thank the control community for its support of this
report and the many contributions, comments, and discussions that help form the
context and content for the report. We are particularly indebted to Dr. Marc Q.
Jacobs for his initiative in the formation of the Panel and for his support of the
project through AFOSR.
Richard M. Murray
Pasadena, June 2002