User:Johnbaillieul
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John Baillieul (May 13, 1945 - ) is an American engineer and robotics professor at Boston University, USA. He served as president of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) in 2006.
John Baillieul holds professorial appointments in three departments at Boston University: he is Professor of Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engtineering and Professor of Manufacturing Engineering. He is currently Chairman of Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering. He has also served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the B.U. College of Engineering. After receiving the Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975, he joined the Mathematics Department of Georgetown University. During the academic year 1983-84 he was the Vinton Hayes Visiting Scientist in Robotics at Harvard University, and in 1991 he was visiting scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT. Professor Baillieul has been an active member of the IEEE Control Systems Society for many years. From 1984 through 1985 he was an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Automatic Control, and in 1987 he served as Program Chairman of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Los Angeles. He is past Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Newsletter and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control for six years from 1992 through this past June. Currently, he is on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Communications in Information and Systems, and the journal Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing. He has been named Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to nonlinear control theory, robotics, and the control of complex mechanical systems. He is a recent recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for various professional contributions. He is past IEEE Control Systems Society Vice-President for Technical Activities and IEEE CSS Vice-President for Publications. He currently is serving as CSS Past President. At the level of the corporate IEEE, Professor Baillieul's service has included four years as TAB Transactions Chair (1998 through 2001), member at large of the Publications Services and Products Board (PSPB) (1999 - 2004, 2006 - ), Chair of the PSPB Strategic Planning Committee (2001 - 2002), and Chair of the PSPB Finance Committee (PSPB Treasurer, 2004). During 2005, John Baillieul chaired the PSPB Ad Hoc Committee on the IEEE Press of the Future. Committee recommendations were distilled into a business plan which the IEEE Press Board and the PSPB are now working to execute. Currently, Baillieul is IEEE Vice President of Publication Services and Products.
John Baillieul's research deals with robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical system theory. His PhD dissertation, completed at Harvard University under the direction of R.W. Brockett in 1975, was an early work dealing with connections between optimal control theory and what has recently been called ``sub-Riemannian geometry. After publishing a number of papers developing geometric methods for nonlinear optimal control problems, he turned his attention to problems in the control of nonlinear systems modeled by homogeneous polynomial differential equations. Such systems describe, for example, the controlled dynamics of a rigid body. His main controllability theorem applied the concept of finiteness embodied in the Hilbert basis theorem to develop a controllability condition which could be verified by checking the rank of an explicit finite dimensional operator. In looking for additional ways in which the mathematical machinery of algebraic geometry could be used to address problems in engineering, Baillieul began a collaboration with C.I. Byrnes on the bifurcation and stability theory of large-scale electric energy system dynamics. A significant discovery was that solutions to the lossless load-flow equations could be exactly enumerated as a result of identifying and isolating some spurious solutions of dimension higher than zero. During the mid 1980's, Baillieul collaborated with M. Levi to develop a control theory for rotating elastic systems. Baillieul and Levi's basic results on the stability of equilibrium configurations of rotating elastic spacecraft have provided the foundation for a great deal of subsequent research in the area. At about the same period in his career, Baillieul wrote a number of papers on motion planning and control of kinematically redundant manipulators. Combined with the spacecraft work, this led naturally to work on problems associated with anholonomy in planning motions for robots which have elastic joints and other components which store energy. Much of his present research is devoted to applying the methods of dynamical systems theory and classical geometric nonlinear control theory to problems of current technological interest. In particular, he has recently worked on applications of mathematical control theory to fluid structure interactions, microelectromechanism dynamics, adaptive optics, and network mediated control of large scale device arrays. His most recent work has dealt with the interplay between communications and information theory and control. He was among the first to articulate a version of the now well-known data-rate theorem---which gives a simple bound in terms of open-loop pole locations on the data-rate that must be sustained in a closed loop system in order for it to be stable. Together with Keyong Li, he has gone on to explore source coding of feedback signals which are designed to provide optimally robust performance in the face of time-varying feedback channel capacity. Motivated by this work, Baillieul has been led to other challenges in the design and operation of networked control systems. He was a pioneer in applying ideas from the theory of graph rigidity to cooperative control of multiple autonomous mobile robot formations. Graph theory is now regarded as perhaps the single most important enabling abstraction for the design of decentralized control algorithms for networks of mobile robots. The work on formation rigidity that has followed the 2003 CDC paper of Baillieul and Suri is an important piece of this abstraction.
