Kameron Eves (B.S. Mechanical Engineering, BYU) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Multiple-Timescale Adaptive Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Dynamical Systems”. Kameron’s dissertation investigated combining nonlinear multiple time-scale controllers that VSCL has been researching for the last 15 years, with adaptive controllers which VSCL has been researching for more than 20 years. Multiple-timescale control has been shown to have difficulty with uncertain systems and adaptive control has been shown to have difficulty with multiple-timescale systems. His dissertation describes a novel control methodology called [K]Control of Adaptive Multiple-timescale Systems (KAMS). KAMS seeks to address systems that simultaneously exhibit uncertain and multiple-timescale behaviors. Unlike traditional multiple-timescale control literature, KAMS uses adaptive control to stabilize the subsystems. The reference models and adapting parameters used in adaptive control significantly complicate the stability analysis. KAMS is a flexible theory and framework and the stability proofs apply to a wide array of adaptive algorithms and multiple-timescale fusion techniques. Additionally, formal and numerical validation of how KAMS can relax the minimum phase assumption for a multitude of common adaptive control methods. KAMS is demonstrated and evaluated on examples consisting of stabilization and attitude control of a quadrotor Unmanned Air System; fuel-efficient orbital transfer maneuvers; and preventing inlet unstart on hypersonic aircraft.
A proposal on KAMS was submitted to DoD sponsors, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded a three-year research project to continue this work, and flight test it. Conference and journal papers are being written on this work.
Kameron’s is the 57th graduate degree earned by a VSCL graduate student. Kameron graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Department at BYU in 2019, with minors in mathematics and business. At BYU, Kameron worked in the Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) laboratory. He will be starting work as an Assistant Professor at Utah Tech University in June.