Robust Feedback Theory

Building on classical feedback control, this elective tackles the central question of how to design controllers that still work when your plant model is wrong — handling uncertainty, disturbances, and performance trade-offs in a principled way rather than by tuning gains until things look fine. You'll spend the term parametrizing stabilizing controllers, reformulating robust design as model-matching problems, and solving them via Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation, Hankel operators, and eventually H-infinity synthesis, with five homeworks driving the computations (Matlab-heavy by the end) alongside a midterm and final. It's the natural sequel to the undergraduate controls sequence and the gateway to graduate-level control theory, giving you the mathematical machinery that anything serious — aerospace, process control, robotics — actually runs on.