During my time as an undergrad, I worked for about a year and a half in Dr Tarunraj Singh’s Control, Dynamics and Estimation Laboratory. It’s here that I really found my passion for nonlinear dynamics and controls. In the CODE lab I learned about PID controllers using a cars electric throttle body and used a phone to detect blood oxygen levels to be fed into diabetes models, but the real transformative moment came spring semester senior year. Dr Singh offered me a chance to sit in on his graduate level nonlinear dynamics and controls course. There I learned about topics ranging from phase portraits to Lyapunov based controller design. It was like drinking water from a fire hose and I loved it. The best part of the class was it was far from a series of lectures. The examples were chosen not at random, but to highlight the broad applicability of different techniques. Hard nonlinearities were explored with topics like how to swing a swing, coupled systems were explored through observing fireflies sync up, and the convergence of a neural network was explored using Lyapunov analysis!
If some of those topics sound familiar, it’s because they inspired some of the earliest posts on the blog