Such adaptive control algorithms have been developed and applied to a wide range of applications, including robotics, blood pressure control, large flexible systems, and flight control systems. Discrete event systems theory is an emerging discipline relevant to communication protocols and parallel computing as well as manufacturing control. Petri net and formal language theory are being developed to model, design, analyze, evaluate performance, and control such interconnected systems. Important issues are deadlock avoidance, synchronization, concurrency, resource allocation, and random events. Applications under study are manufacturing automation and integration and task coordination for cooperating robotic systems.
All dynamic systems are fundamentally nonlinear.
The nonlinearity can be either treated as a perturbation of a nominally linear system or directly taken into account in a nonlinear control design. In the first approach, linear control designs have been developed under various performance and robustness specifications. In the second approach, various nonlinear control strategies have been developed based on the Lyapunov theory, optimal control, and predictive control. There are currently various research projects applying these tools in simulation and experimentation, to a wide range of applications including vehicles, smart structures with piezoelectric actuators and sensors and shape memory alloy wires, robot position and force control, extrusion, and welding. Communications, Information, and Signal Processing Advanced study and research in this field deals with the encoding, transmission, retrieval, and interpretation of information.