Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Motion planning is not only a crucial issue in control theory, but also a widespread task of all sort of human activities. The aim of the project-team is to study the various aspects preceding and framing motion planning: accessibility analysis (determining which configurations are attainable), criteria to make choice among possible trajectories, trajectory tracking (fixing a possibly unfeasible trajectory and following it as closely as required), performance analysis (determining the cost of a tracking strategy), design of implementable algorithms, robustness of a control strategy with respect to computationally motivated discretizations, etc. The viewpoint that we adopt comes from geometric control: our main interest is in qualitative and intrinsic properties and our focus is on trajectories (either individual ones or families of them).

The main application domain of GECO is quantum control. The importance of designing efficient transfers between different atomic or molecular levels in atomic and molecular physics is due to its applications to photochemistry (control by laser pulses of chemical reactions), nuclear magnetic resonance (control by a magnetic field of spin dynamics) and, on a more distant time horizon, the strategic domain of quantum computing.

A second application area concerns the control interpretation of phenomena appearing in neurophysiology. It studies the modeling of the mechanisms supervising some biomechanics actions or sensorial reactions such as image reconstruction by the primary visual cortex, eyes movement and body motion. All these problems can be seen as motion planning tasks accomplished by the brain.

As a third applicative domain we propose a system dynamics approach to switched systems. Switched systems are characterized by the interaction of continuous dynamics (physical system) and discrete/logical components. They provide a popular modeling framework for heterogeneous aspects issuing from automotive and transportation industry, energy management and factory automation.