The analysis of such systems lies at the boundary of computer science and control theory. While the planning and control problems have been addressed separately by computer scientists and control theorists, the interaction of the discrete and continuous worlds is largely left to the ingenuity of engineers. As the complexity of the computer controlled physical systems grows, such methods break down and there is a need for rigorous theory to design, build, and evaluate hybrid systems. With the support of a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship and a MURI grant, we hope to contribute to the emerging hybrid control literature in the area of control design for systems whose physical dynamics are hybrid and whose desired behavior can be defined by a hybrid system. For more on hybrid systems, see this page .
Switched systems are a special class of hybrid systems.
We focus on problems where the switching occurs in the basic physical system that is being modelled and controlled.