Kolmanovsky, Ilya

Professor Kolmanovsky is a former graduate of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and has spent close to 15 years of his subsequent professional career at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. Professor Kolmanovsky re-joined the department as professor in January 2010.

Professor Kolmanovsky’s research focuses on control of advanced aerospace and automotive systems. His recent publications address challenges in spacecraft orbital and attitude control and in engine and propulsion systems control.

Professor Kolmanovsky’s special area of interests in control theory is control of systems with constraints. With the increasing trend towards system downsizing (smaller satellites, air vehicles, drones, engines, etc.) and the growing stringency of requirements, constraint handling and limit protection are becoming increasingly important and critical for engineered systems. Constraints can represent actuator range/rate limits, safety requirements, operational limits, and stationary and moving obstacle avoidance requirements. While in some cases constraint violation has only benign consequences (e.g. loss of efficiency), it can be catastrophic in others. Effective controllers for systems with constraints must be nonlinear and often predictive, and they have to sufficiently but non-conservatively account for the uncertainty in the operating environment. Professor Kolmanovsky’s and his students research addresses the development of variety of schemes for constraint enforcement, including reference governors, chained invariant set controllers, and drift counteraction optimal controllers. He also conducts research in the area of model predictive control (MPC) and numerical algorithms for real-time optimization that are used in control of constrained systems. He is interested in applications and demonstration of these algorithms on a variety of space, air and ground vehicle platforms.