Scope

New technologies have created engineering problems where successful controller designs must account for nonlinear effects, and existing theories for general nonlinear systems often prove to be insufficient. Moreover, most of the existing nonlinear control design methods do not take into account the physical properties of the system and tend to compensate for any nonlinear effect; thus creating unnecessary control actions and potential fragility. Furthermore, it has been recognized that nonlinearities are not necessarily a drawback and may even be beneficial. Starting from these observations new approaches to nonlinear control that exploit the structure and the properties of mechanical and electromechanical systems, in particular the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian structures, have been discussed in the literature in recent years by a growing number of international experts. This also takes into account the important roles played by Hamiltonian and Lagrangian methods in various scientific disciplines ranging such as classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, electrodynamics, irreversible thermodynamics, mass and heat transport systems, celestial mechanics, optimal control theory, and dynamical systems theory.

Following these considerations, the goals of the fourth IFAC Workshop on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Methods for Nonlinear Control are to highlight new modeling and control problems, to bring together control experts from different areas, and to present state-of-the-art results on the analysis and control of complex dynamical engineering systems: in brief, the important role of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian structures as design methods will be investigated.

Topics

This workshop will cover new developments in nonlinear control theory, design methods and applications where techniques have been effectively tailored to exploit the mechanical and electromechanical system structure. The workshop program will include mainly contributed papers, although papers by leading international authorities are solicited. In-depth discussions by all participants on basic problems and future directions is encouraged.