On the stability of the soft pendulum with affine curvature: open-loop, collocated closed-loop, and switching control

This letter investigates the stability properties of the soft inverted pendulum with affine curvature - a template model for nonlinear control of underactuated soft robots. We look at how changes in physical parameters affect stability and equilibrium. We give conditions under which zero dynamics corresponding to a collocated choice of the...

Covid-19 and Flattening the Curve: a Feedback Control Perspective

Many of the policies that were put into place during the Covid-19 pandemic had a common goal: to flatten the curve of the number of infected people so that its peak remains under a critical threshold. This letter considers the challenge of engineering a strategy that enforces such a goal using control theory. We introduce a simple formulation...

Controlled islanding of power networks based on graph reduction and spectral clustering

Intentional controlled islanding aims to split the power system into self-sustainable islands after a severe disturbance, but prior the uncontrolled network separation. Given its nature (i.e. last resort for blackout prevention), this emergency control technique must be adopted as quickly as possible. This paper proposes a computationally...