Mechanics and Control

Book excerpt: The Workshop on Control Mechanics has been held at the University of South ern California annually since 1988 under the leadership of late Professor Janislaw M. Skowronski. The primary goal of Professor Skowronski in organizing this series of work shops was to promote the use of advanced mechanics method in control theory with a special emphasis on the control of nonlinear mechanical systems subject to uncertainty. This goal has been achieved through a consistent participation of a large number of researchers in the field of control and mechanics and an intensive exchange of their ideas. Professor Skowronski passed away unexpectedly on March 21, 1992, after the conclusion of the Fifth Workshop. The great success of the Fifth Workshop as well as the entire Control Mechanics Workshops over the years is almost exclusively due to his dedication, enthusiasm, and organizational capabilities. His untimely demise is a great loss to us and to the mechanics and control community. The proceedings of the Fifth Workshop presented in this volume are dedicated to Professor Angelo Miele, one of the pioneers and ,a leading contributor in many fields of control theory and its applications. His contribution spans a wide range of topics such as optimization theory, flight mechanics, astrodynamics, ocean engineering, and numerical methods. The presentations in the workshop reflected many of the areas in which Professor Miele has been active. The papers included in this volume are divided into three major groups of topics.