UCLA Engineering Professor Part of Multi-Institutional Initiative to Rebuild Hybrid Control Systems

Paulo Tabuada, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, is a principal investigator of a multidisciplinary university research team tasked to revamp control systems that involve interactions between their physical and cyber components.

Such systems consist of physical components that are constantly running and software modules that are executed periodically or sporadically, depending on specific events. “Unfortunately, progress in hybrid control systems has been hampered by the difficulty to reconcile these two distinctly different types of components,” said Tabuada, who holds the UCLA Vijay K. Dhir Chair in Engineering. “To address this challenge, we will rebuild the theoretical foundations of hybrid control systems using a suite of advanced mathematical tools that are less known in engineering.”

Led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Hybrid Dynamics – Deconstruction and Aggregation project, or HyDDRA, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2023 Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Program. HyDDRA is one of 31 research teams from 61 academic institutions funded by the program, with an average award of $7.1 million over five years. 

The HyDDRA project also includes researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Caltech and the Topos Institute in Berkeley, California.