Daniel Zelazo of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Passivity theory is one of the cornerstones of control theory providing a systematic way to study the stability of interconnected systems. In practice, many systems are not passive, and must be passivized in order to be included in the framework of passivity theory. Input-output (loop) transformations are the most general tool for passivizing systems. In this paper, we propose a characterization of all possible input-output transformations that map a system with given shortage of passivity to a system with prescribed excess of passivity. We do so by using the connection between passivity theory and cones for SISO systems, and using the S-lemma for MIMO systems. We also present several possible applications of our results, including simultaneous passivation of multiple systems or with respect to multiple equilibria, as well as optimization problems such as $\mathcal{L}_2$-gain minimization.

Biography:

Daniel Zelazo received the B.Sc. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, in 2009. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer with the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is an Associate Professor of aerospace engineering with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He has served as associate editor for the IEEE Control Systems Letters and subject editor for the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.  His research interests include topics related to multiagent systems.