December 16, 2015
Aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate Sungpil Yang from the Controls Lab for Distributed Uncertain Systems (C-DUS Lab) was selected to receive the American Astronautical Society’s (AAS) John V. Breakwell Student Travel Award to present the paper, “Dynamically Scaled Immersion And Invariance Approach For Spacecraft Attitude Tracking Control,” co-authored with Professor Maruthi Akella.
According to the AAS, the purpose of the award is to encourage and promote research activity in space flight mechanics and astrodynamics by providing financial support to one or more students presenting papers at AAS and/or AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meetings and Astrodynamics Conferences. The award includes travel expenses up to $1,000 and a certificate.
Yang joins C-DUS Lab alumni Travis Mercker (2011), Sonia Hernandez (2013), and Divya Thakur (2013) in receiving this highly competitive award. His faculty advisor, Maruthi Akella, was the first recipient of the Breakwell award in 1999 for his paper titled "Adaptive Realization of Linear Closed Loop Tracking Dynamics in the Presence of Large System Model Errors."
Yang’s research primarily focuses on adaptive control of aerospace and robotic systems that bear large-scale dynamic model uncertaintities due to disturbance environments, calibration errors, and actuator misalignments.
Among his contributions, the most important one pertains to the resolution of a nearly decade long open-problem addressing the synthesis of adaptive controllers for a very broad class of dynamical systems. These new results significantly advance the existing theory of "immersion and invariance" adaptive control by providing rigorous guarantees for both stability and control performance.
The paper that Yang will present at the 2016 AAS Space Flight Mechanics Meeting in Napa Valley, CA discusses specific applications of this new theory to controlling rotational motion of space robotic systems.
