Research Projects

Maximum hands-off control is a control paradigm that maximizes the time in the control horizon over which the control input is zero. This approach is crucial in engineering systems to achieve desired control objectives while minimizing control efforts. However, designing such a control scheme is numerically challenging, as identifying the sparsest sequence is equivalent to solving an optimization problem with non-convex and discontinuous objectives. This project aims to extend maximum hands-off control to hybrid dynamical systems, which involve continuous and discrete dynamics and capture the behavior of modern complex engineering systems. The project will employ sparse optimization methods to achieve this objective, as sparsity requirements are imposed on the choice of discrete and continuous control input, leading to a hybrid optimization problem.