Control Method and Symmetry
A Special Issue of Symmetry (ISSN 2073-8994) belonging to the section "B: Mathematics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2027 | Viewed by 9
Editors
Interests: optimization management and control of water transportation systems; dynamic modeling, path planning, control, and application of USV
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: formal verification of (time-delay/stochastic) hybrid systems; formal verification of artificial intelligence
Interests: marine vehicles; robust control; intelligent control; guidance; nonlinear control
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Symmetry is a structural property of nearly every control problem, and it shapes both how controllers are designed and how well they perform. It appears in the translation invariance of linear plants, the kinematic Lie groups of robot manipulators, the permutation symmetry of multi-agent networks and the energy conservation captured by port-Hamiltonian models. Control methods that recognize this symmetry gain model simplicity, fewer tuning parameters and provable stability; methods that ignore it, pay with redundant computation and fragile performance. In practice, symmetry is rarely exact: actuator saturation, faults, parameter drift and exogenous disturbances break the underlying group actions, and a controller designed for the symmetric case must still behave predictably once that symmetry is lost. How to design control methods around symmetry and how to recover performance when symmetry breaks remain central and open problems. Recent progress in energy shaping, equivariant learning and safe multi-agent reinforcement learning makes this an opportune moment to consolidate the field. In this context, we are pleased to invite you to submit articles that develop control methods built on symmetry, or analyze and compensate for the consequences of symmetry breaking, in autonomous surface and underwater vessels, UAV swarms, robotic systems, intelligent transportation and marine engineering.
The aim of the Special Issue is to publish articles related to the following topics of the journal Symmetry’s “Computer Section” (especially cybernetics, machine intelligence and autonomous systems), “Engineering and Materials Section” (especially control engineering and automation) and “Physics Section” (especially mathematical physics, geometry and the symmetry analysis of dynamical systems).
Original, unpublished research manuscripts, comments about published articles and reviews are welcome. To help you in preparing materials for your papers, you can focus on the following topics mentioned below. These are recommendations and the scope of the Special Issue is not limited to these.
Some suggested themes appropriate for this Special Issue are as follows:
- Control methods that exploit symmetry: Geometric and Lie-group control, port-Hamiltonian modeling, energy shaping and passivity-based design;
- Symmetry-aware synthesis of trajectory-tracking and disturbance-rejection controllers for underactuated autonomous vehicles, including IDA-PBC;
- Symmetry-reduced modeling and identification and structure-preserving or equivariant learning as control methods;
- Permutation-invariant consensus, formation and flocking control of multi-agent and networked vehicle teams across air, sea and ground domains;
- Safe and constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning with symmetry-respecting or structure-aware guarantees;
- Analysis and compensation of symmetry breaking caused by saturation, faults, parameter drift and environmental disturbances in autonomous systems.
I look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Man Zhu
Prof. Dr. Bai Xue
Prof. Dr. Weidong Zhang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Symmetry is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- symmetry in control methods
- geometric and Lie-group control
- port-Hamiltonian and passivity-based control
- equivariant and structure-preserving learning
- multi-agent consensus and formation control
- safe multi-agent reinforcement learning
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