Ahatract-We investigate the existence and uniqueness of robust time-optimal control solutions of flexible structures for rest-torest motion. We show that several robust time-optimal control designs for flexible systems are equivalent to traditional nonrobust time-optimal controls for difirent systems. This equivalence implies that the robust time-optimal controllers must then have all the prope...

Boolean networks (BNs) are discrete-time dynamical systems with Boolean state-variables. BNs are recently attracting considerable interest as computational models for biological systems and, in particular, as models of gene regulating networks. Boolean control networks (BCNs) are Boolean networks with Boolean inputs. We consider the problem of steering a BCN from a given state to a desired stat...

The Acrobot, a two-link arm that is unactuated at the first joint, is challenging to control because it is an under actuated, nonlinear, continuous system. We describe a direct search algorithm for finding swingup trajectories for the Acrobot. The algorithm uses a Iookahead search that maximizes the Acrobot’s totaf energy in an N-step window. Because the controls are extremal and the number of ...

Fundamental limitations in decentralized control of systems with multivariable zeros are considered. It is shown that arbitrary bandwidth can be obtained with a stable block-diagonal controller, if certain subsystems of the open-loop system fail to have zeros in the right half-plane and a high-frequency condition holds. Implications on control structure design and sequential loop-closuring meth...

This paper introduces a method to minimize norms on nonlinear trajectory sensitivities during open-loop trajectory optimization. Specifically, we derive new parametric sensitivity terms that measure the variation in nonlinear (continuous-time) trajectories due to variations in model parameters, and hybrid sensitivities, which account for variations in trajectory caused by sudden transitions fro...