On the determination of the properties of a medium from its reflection coefficient

This thesis demonstrates how the parameters of a slightly non-homogeneous medium can be derived approximately from the reflection coefficient.

Two types of media are investigated. The first is described by the one-dimensional wave equation, the second by the more complex Timoshenko beam equation. In both cases, the media are assumed to be infinite in extent, with the media parameters becoming homogeneous as the space variable approaches positive or negative infinity.

Much effort is placed in deriving properties of the reflection coefficient for both cases. The wave equation is considered primarily to introduce the techniques used to investigate the more complex Timoshenko equation. In both cases, an approximation is derived for one of the medium parameters involving the reflection coefficient.

Some problems in nonlinear elasticity

Two separate problems are discussed: axisymmetric equilibrium configurations of a circular membrane under pressure and subject to thrust along its edge, and the buckling of a circular cylindrical shell.

An ordinary differential equation governing the circular membrane is imbedded in a family of n-dimensional nonlinear equations. Phase plane methods are used to examine the number of solutions corresponding to a parameter which generalizes the thrust, as well as other parameters determining the shape of the nonlinearity and the undeformed shape of the membrane. It is found that in any number of dimensions there exists a value of the generalized thrust for which a countable infinity of solutions exist if some of the remaining parameters are made sufficiently large. Criteria describing the number of solutions in other cases are also given.

Donnell-type equations are used to model a circular cylindrical shell. The static problem of bifurcation of buckled modes from Poisson expansion is analyzed using an iteration scheme and pertubation methods. Analysis shows that although buckling loads are usually simple eigenvalues, they may have arbitrarily large but finite multiplicity when the ratio of the shell's length and circumference is rational. A numerical study of the critical buckling load for simple eigenvalues indicates that the number of waves along the axis of the deformed shell is roughly proportional to the length of the shell, suggesting the possibility of a "characteristic length." Further numerical work indicates that initial post-buckling curves are typically steep, although the load may increase or decrease. It is shown that either a sheet of solutions or two distinct branches bifurcate from a double eigenvalue. Furthermore, a shell may be subject to a uniform torque, even though one is not prescribed at the ends of the shell, through the interaction of two modes with the same number of circumferential waves. Finally, multiple time scale techniques are used to study the dynamic buckling of a rectangular plate as well as a circular cylindrical shell; transition to a new steady state amplitude determined by the nonlinearity is shown. The importance of damping in determining equilibrium configurations independent of initial conditions is illustrated.

Nearly free molecular heat transfer from a sphere

Consider a sphere immersed in a rarefied monatomic gas with zero mean flow. The distribution function of the molecules at infinity is chosen to be a Maxwellian. The boundary condition at the body is diffuse reflection with perfect accommodation to the surface temperature. The microscopic flow of particles about the sphere is modeled kinetically by the Boltzmann equation with the Krook collision term. Appropriate normalizations in the near and far fields lead to a perturbation solution of the problem, expanded in terms of the ratio of body diameter to mean free path (inverse Knudsen number). The distribution function is found directly in each region, and intermediate matching is demonstrated. The heat transfer from the sphere is then calculated as an integral over this distribution function in the inner region. Final results indicate that the heat transfer may at first increase over its free flow value before falling to the continuum level.

Some central limit theorems for doubly restricted partitions

Let P_{K, L}(N) be the number of unordered partitions of a positive integer N into K or fewer positive integer parts, each part not exceeding L. A distribution of the form

Ʃ/N≤x P_K,L(N)

is considered first. For any fixed K, this distribution approaches a piecewise polynomial function as L increases to infinity. As both K and L approach infinity, this distribution is asymptotically normal. These results are proved by studying the convergence of the characteristic function.

The main result is the asymptotic behavior of P_K,K(N) itself, for certain large K and N. This is obtained by studying a contour integral of the generating function taken along the unit circle. The bulk of the estimate comes from integrating along a small arc near the point 1. Diophantine approximation is used to show that the integral along the rest of the circle is much smaller.

Two and Three Finger Caging of Polygons and Polyhedra

Multi-finger caging offers a rigorous and robust approach to robot grasping. This thesis provides several novel algorithms for caging polygons and polyhedra in two and three dimensions. Caging refers to a robotic grasp that does not necessarily immobilize an object, but prevents it from escaping to infinity. The first algorithm considers caging a polygon in two dimensions using two point fingers. The second algorithm extends the first to three dimensions. The third algorithm considers caging a convex polygon in two dimensions using three point fingers, and considers robustness of this cage to variations in the relative positions of the fingers.

This thesis describes an algorithm for finding all two-finger cage formations of planar polygonal objects based on a contact-space formulation. It shows that two-finger cages have several useful properties in contact space. First, the critical points of the cage representation in the hand’s configuration space appear as critical points of the inter-finger distance function in contact space. Second, these critical points can be graphically characterized directly on the object’s boundary. Third, contact space admits a natural rectangular decomposition such that all critical points lie on the rectangle boundaries, and the sublevel sets of contact space and free space are topologically equivalent. These properties lead to a caging graph that can be readily constructed in contact space. Starting from a desired immobilizing grasp of a polygonal object, the caging graph is searched for the minimal, intermediate, and maximal caging regions surrounding the immobilizing grasp. An example constructed from real-world data illustrates and validates the method.

A second algorithm is developed for finding caging formations of a 3D polyhedron for two point fingers using a lower dimensional contact-space formulation. Results from the two-dimensional algorithm are extended to three dimension. Critical points of the inter-finger distance function are shown to be identical to the critical points of the cage. A decomposition of contact space into 4D regions having useful properties is demonstrated. A geometric analysis of the critical points of the inter-finger distance function results in a catalog of grasps in which the cages change topology, leading to a simple test to classify critical points. With these properties established, the search algorithm from the two-dimensional case may be applied to the three-dimensional problem. An implemented example demonstrates the method.

This thesis also presents a study of cages of convex polygonal objects using three point fingers. It considers a three-parameter model of the relative position of the fingers, which gives complete generality for three point fingers in the plane. It analyzes robustness of caging grasps to variations in the relative position of the fingers without breaking the cage. Using a simple decomposition of free space around the polygon, we present an algorithm which gives all caging placements of the fingers and a characterization of the robustness of these cages.

Large plane deformations of thin elastic sheets of neo-hookean material

Large plane deformations of thin elastic sheets of neo-Hookean material are considered and a method of successive substitutions is developed to solve problems within the two-dimensional theory of finite plane stress. The first approximation is determined by linear boundary value problems on two harmonic functions, and it is approached asymptotically at very large extensions in the plane of the sheet. The second and higher approximations are obtained by solving Poisson equations. The method requires modification when the membrane has a traction-free edge.

Several problems are treated involving infinite sheets under uniform biaxial stretching at infinity. First approximations are obtained when a circular or elliptic inclusion is present and when the sheet has a circular or elliptic hole, including the limiting cases of a line inclusion and a straight crack or slit. Good agreement with exact solutions is found for circularly symmetric deformations. Other examples discuss the stretching of a short wide strip, the deformation near a boundary corner which is traction-free, and the application of a concentrated load to a boundary point.

Distributed Optimal Control of Cyber-Physical Systems: Controller Synthesis, Architecture Design and System Identification

The centralized paradigm of a single controller and a single plant upon which modern control theory is built is no longer applicable to modern cyber-physical systems of interest, such as the power-grid, software defined networks or automated highways systems, as these are all large-scale and spatially distributed. Both the scale and the distributed nature of these systems has motivated the decentralization of control schemes into local sub-controllers that measure, exchange and act on locally available subsets of the globally available system information. This decentralization of control logic leads to different decision makers acting on asymmetric information sets, introduces the need for coordination between them, and perhaps not surprisingly makes the resulting optimal control problem much harder to solve. In fact, shortly after such questions were posed, it was realized that seemingly simple decentralized optimal control problems are computationally intractable to solve, with the Wistenhausen counterexample being a famous instance of this phenomenon. Spurred on by this perhaps discouraging result, a concerted 40 year effort to identify tractable classes of distributed optimal control problems culminated in the notion of quadratic invariance, which loosely states that if sub-controllers can exchange information with each other at least as quickly as the effect of their control actions propagates through the plant, then the resulting distributed optimal control problem admits a convex formulation.

The identification of quadratic invariance as an appropriate means of "convexifying" distributed optimal control problems led to a renewed enthusiasm in the controller synthesis community, resulting in a rich set of results over the past decade. The contributions of this thesis can be seen as being a part of this broader family of results, with a particular focus on closing the gap between theory and practice by relaxing or removing assumptions made in the traditional distributed optimal control framework. Our contributions are to the foundational theory of distributed optimal control, and fall under three broad categories, namely controller synthesis, architecture design and system identification.

We begin by providing two novel controller synthesis algorithms. The first is a solution to the distributed H-infinity optimal control problem subject to delay constraints, and provides the only known exact characterization of delay-constrained distributed controllers satisfying an H-infinity norm bound. The second is an explicit dynamic programming solution to a two player LQR state-feedback problem with varying delays. Accommodating varying delays represents an important first step in combining distributed optimal control theory with the area of Networked Control Systems that considers lossy channels in the feedback loop. Our next set of results are concerned with controller architecture design. When designing controllers for large-scale systems, the architectural aspects of the controller such as the placement of actuators, sensors, and the communication links between them can no longer be taken as given -- indeed the task of designing this architecture is now as important as the design of the control laws themselves. To address this task, we formulate the Regularization for Design (RFD) framework, which is a unifying computationally tractable approach, based on the model matching framework and atomic norm regularization, for the simultaneous co-design of a structured optimal controller and the architecture needed to implement it. Our final result is a contribution to distributed system identification. Traditional system identification techniques such as subspace identification are not computationally scalable, and destroy rather than leverage any a priori information about the system's interconnection structure. We argue that in the context of system identification, an essential building block of any scalable algorithm is the ability to estimate local dynamics within a large interconnected system. To that end we propose a promising heuristic for identifying the dynamics of a subsystem that is still connected to a large system. We exploit the fact that the transfer function of the local dynamics is low-order, but full-rank, while the transfer function of the global dynamics is high-order, but low-rank, to formulate this separation task as a nuclear norm minimization problem. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of future research directions, with a particular emphasis on how to incorporate the results of this thesis, and those of optimal control theory in general, into a broader theory of dynamics, control and optimization in layered architectures.