LIDS Seminar Series

Monday, November 25, 2024 - 4:00pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS Seminar Series

Speaker Name

Miloslav Krstic

Affiliation

UCSD

Building and Room Number

32-155

"PDE Backstepping: Offline Learning Enables Online-Adaptive Control"

The talk combines a history lecture, commissioned for the 2024 IEEE Control History Forum, with the 2023 IEEE Bode Prize Lecture, on the future of model-based control in the era of machine learning. I review the birth and the 25-year progression of ideas behind the method of backstepping for PDEs. By not imitating classical ODE designs (LQG, H-infinity) but instead performing explicit feedback transformations into physically desirable PDEs, backstepping feedback laws became the first and only PDE control designs that attain the aspiration of easily and rigorously implemented online learning-based (adaptive) control. A story is told of the development of PDE backstepping, from its birth out of differential-geometric nonlinear control, to its adult-age partnership with machine learning and neural operators. The classes of parabolic, hyperbolic, and delay systems are covered, as well as applications in additive manufacturing, traffic flow, and multi-agent deployment. 

Miroslav Krstic is Distinguished Professor and Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at University of California, San Diego. He is Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, ASME, SIAM, AAAS, AIAA (Assoc. Fellow), IET (UK), and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Krstic is a recipient of the Bellman Control Heritage Award, Bode Lecture Prize, SIAM Reid Prize, ASME Oldenburger Medal, Nyquist Lecture Prize, Paynter Award, Ragazzini Education Award, IFAC Nonlinear Control Systems Award, IFAC Ruth Curtain Distributed Parameter Systems Award, IFAC Adaptive and Learning Systems Award, Chestnut textbook prize, CSS Distinguished Member Award, the PECASE, NSF Career, and ONR Young Investigator awards, the Schuck (’96 and ’19) and Axelby paper prizes, and the first UCSD Research Award given to an engineer. Krstic is also the inaugural recipient of the A.V. Balakrishnan Award for the Mathematics of Systems. He is due to transition from Editor-in-Chief of Systems & Control Letters to EiC of IEEE Trans. Automatic Control in January 2026. Krstic is has coauthored 18 books and about 490 journal papers. 

The Fall 2024 LIDS Seminar Series is curated by Navid Azizan with support from Jin Gao, Shyla Putrevu, and Jerard Welcome.