Shankar Bhattacharyya, the Robert M. Kennedy Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is an invited speaker at the international conference "Optimization in Robustness and Control," organized by the Institute of Control Science, Moscow, Russia.
The conference, which is slated for May 13-15, will celebrate the 80th birthday of academician Boris Polyak who pioneered the use of optimization in control systems during his career spanning 50 years in the Soviet Union and Russia.
Bhattacharyya's talk will describe the new measurement based approaches to the design of static and dynamic systems, developed by him and his students and coworkers. The approach is based on an extension and generalization of Thevenin's Theorem of classical circuit theory which shows that a few measurements processed strategically can determine control or decision parameters without reconstructing a model of the system.
The design technique is applicable to electrical, mechanical, civil, hydraulic and aerospace engineering systems. It has the potential to circumvent some of the limitations of model based design which have spawned fields such as robust and adaptive control. The most recent results have shown that extremal designs are also possible without knowledge of models.
Bhattacharyya's fundamental contributions to Control Science are documented in more than 250 papers and eight books. His honors and awards include being named IEEE Fellow (1989), IFAC Fellow (2011) and being elected a Foreign Member to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (2012).