Backstepping for partial differential equations: A survey

Abstract

Systems modeled by partial differential equations (PDEs) are at least as ubiquitous as those by nature finite-dimensional and modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). And yet, systematic and readily usable methodologies, for such a significant portion of real systems, have been historically scarce. Around the year 2000, the backstepping approach to PDE control began to offer not only a less abstract alternative to PDE control techniques replicating optimal and spectrum assignment techniques of the 1960s, but also enabled the methodologies of adaptive and nonlinear control, matured in the 1980s and 1990s, to be extended from ODEs to PDEs, allowing feedback synthesis for systems that are uncertain, nonlinear, and infinite-dimensional. The PDE backstepping literature has since grown to hundreds of papers and nearly a dozen books. This survey aims to facilitate the entry into this thriving area of overwhelming size and topical diversity. Designs of controllers and observers, for parabolic, hyperbolic, and other classes of PDEs, in one or more dimensions, with nonlinear, adaptive, sampled-data, and event-triggered extensions, are covered in the survey. The lifeblood of control are technology and physics. The survey places a particular emphasis on applications that have motivated the development of the theory and which have benefited from the theory and designs: flows, flexible structures, materials, thermal and chemically reacting dynamics, energy (from oil drilling to batteries and magnetic confinement fusion), and vehicles.