Bacterial Societies: Cooperation, Colonization, and Competition in Micro-Scale Ecosystems

In this thesis, I describe experiments aimed at understanding bacterial population dynamics in ecosystems that are spatially structured at the micro-scale. We combine microfabrication and microfluidics to create synthetic ecosystems that have a complex yet well-defined geometry and chemical composition. Bacteria that inhabit such ecosystems can...

Structured controller synthesis for mechanical servo-systems: Algorithms, relaxations and optimality certificates

In many application areas of mechanical servo-systems the high demands on the performance often imply a tightly tuned feedback controller, that takes dynamical interaction into account. Model-based H-optimal controller synthesis is a well-suited technique for this purpose. However, the state-of-the-art synthesis approach yields controllers with...