Professor Malisoff's REU Opportunities for LSU Students

Thank you for your interest in my Research Experiences for
Undergraduates (or REU) projects. I am recruiting undergraduate
research assistants, as part of programs such as the LSU Discover
program, and also to work on my currently funded research grants
from the US government. I am only able to consider current LSU
undergraduates for these openings at this time. The Discover
program gives LSU students the chance to work side by side with
mentors to get hands on experience by helping with research so they
can get a feel for what it will be like working in their field. My
REU students have assisted with my National Science Foundation
Directorate for Engineering funded projects, using computer
programs, and have presented at the Emerging Researchers National
Conference in STEM and other important undergraduate conferences.
My projects are collaborative with engineering professors. The REU
work tests the performance of feedback controls that are being
developed in my projects. Feedback controls are ways to
automatically adjust the behavior of dynamical systems, in response
to information about the systems' own states or surroundings, to
achieve a prescribed goal, like ensuring that a robot tracks a
path. Feedback controls are used to increase the autonomy of
engineering systems arising in aerospace and marine applications;
see https://www.math.lsu.edu/~malisoff/MarineRobotics. Working on
my projects provides students with training at the interface of
engineering and mathematics that helps prepare them to work in
industry or for graduate study in engineering or mathematics.

My projects are best suited for undergraduates who have already
taken or are currently taking a course in differential equations,
such as Math 2065 or 2070 or 2090 at LSU, and who have experience
with, or an interest in learning to use, Mathematica, which is a
basic computer program that is used to numerically solve
complicated differential equations. The REU projects would largely
involve writing computer code to conduct numerical tests to compare
new methods with previously reported methods. However, no
background in engineering is necessary to do well on my projects.

Here are some studies that I recently co-authored with students.
They focus on feedback control theory with engineering
applications, rather than the kinds of calculations or computer
programming that a beginning Discover student would do, and so are
more advanced than the research that typical Discover students
would do. However, they illustrate the wide range of possible
applications of feedback controls in engineering.

11. Schieni, R., C. Zhao, J. Barreira, M. Malisoff, and L. Burlion,
"Quadrotor flight envelope protection while following high-speed
trajectories: a reference governor approach," in Proceedings of the
AIAA SciTech Forum (National Harbor MD, 23-27 January 2023).

10. Schieni, R., C. Zhao, M. Malisoff, and L. Burlion, "Reference
governor design in the presence of uncertain polynomial
constraints," https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06310.

9. Weston, J., and M. Malisoff, "Sequential predictors under time-varying
feedback and measurement delays and sampling," IEEE Transactions on
Automatic Control, Volume 64, Issue 7, July 2019, pp. 2991-2996.
https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2018.2874694

8. Varnell, P., M. Malisoff, and F. Zhang, "Stability and robustness
analysis for human pointing motions with acceleration under feedback
delays," International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, Volume
27, Issue 5, March 2017, pp. 703-721. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rnc.3593

7. Malisoff, M., R. Sizemore, and F. Zhang, "Adaptive planar curve
tracking control and robustness analysis under state constraints and
unknown curvature," Automatica, Volume 75, January 2017, pp. 133-143.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2016.09.017

6. Malisoff, M., R. Sizemore, and F. Zhang, "Robustness of adaptive
control for three-dimensional curve tracking under state constraints:
effects of scaling control terms," in Proceedings of the 55th IEEE
Conference on Decision and Control (Las Vegas, NV, 12-14 December 2016),
pp. 3825-3830. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CDC.2016.7798846

5. Karafyllis, I., M. Malisoff, M. de Queiroz, M. Krstic, and R. Yang,
"Predictor-based tracking for neuromuscular electrical stimulation,"
International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, Volume 25, Issue
14, September 2015, pp. 2391-2419. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rnc.3211

4. Mukhopadhyay, S., C. Wang, M. Patterson, M. Malisoff, and F. Zhang,
"Collaborative autonomous surveys in marine environments affected by oil
spills," in Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks 2014, Studies in
Computational Intelligence Series Vol. 554, Springer, New York, 2014, pp.
87-113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55029-4_5

3. Sadikhov, T., W. Haddad, and M. Malisoff, "A universal feedback
controller for discontinuous dynamical systems using nonsmooth control
Lyapunov functions," in Proceedings of the 2014 American Control
Conference (Portland, OR, 4-6 June 2014), pp. 1174-1179. [Awarded Best
Presentation in Session Award for session Nonlinear Systems II at
Conference.] http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACC.2014.6859134

2. Gruszka, A., M. Malisoff, and F. Mazenc, "Bounded tracking controllers
and robustness analysis for UAVs," IEEE Transactions on Automatic
Control, Volume 58, Issue 1, January 2013, pp. 280-287.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2012.2203056

1. Gruszka, A., M. Malisoff, and F. Mazenc, "Tracking control and
robustness analysis for PVTOL aircraft under bounded feedbacks,"
International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, Volume 22, Issue
17, November 2012, pp. 1899-1920. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rnc.1794

For information on how to apply for a Discover position, check:
https://www.lsu.edu/discover/index.php Support is contingent on the
availability of funds. For more about my REU projects, see
https://www.math.lsu.edu/ugrad/UndergraduateResearch/CurrentProjects.