Talk:Top Ten (Challenge) Problems in Control

Status update, 19 Aug 08

At a ARO strategic planning meeting, I had the opportunity to look back on the list of problems (including copying it to my wiki) and think through were we are on these various problems. Here are some quick thoughts:

• Redesign the Feedback Control System of a Bacteria - this challenge got written up as a potential example for an NSF systems engineering work. Synthetic biology is making progress on some of the components required to do this, but there is still a long way to go.
• Control 101 - CDS 101/110a is an attempt at this, along with a new textbook entitled Feedback Systems.
• Packet-Based Control Theory - there is now a pretty strong theory available for handling things like packet loss and time delay in networked control systems. See, for example, some of the lectures from a recent short course on this subject.
• Write a 100,000+ line program that works correctly on first execution - this one is far from being solved, but interestingly the software that Team Caltech wrote for the DARPA Urban Challenge was about 200,000 lines long (and definitely could have used some verification)