Professor Mark Cannon

I give tutorials in college on a range of topics within Mechanical, Civil and Information Engineering. My tutorials for the first year students cover the structures and mechanics courses. For the second and third year core course I give tutorials in structural analysis, dynamics and control. At the Engineering Department I give first year lectures on dynamics, second and third year lectures on control systems, and specialist control engineering options for the fourth year. I also supervise third and fourth year undergraduate projects.

My research is concerned with automatic control of dynamic systems, which involves a mix of physical modelling, optimization theory, statistics and stability theory. The aim is to optimize the performance of dynamic systems, taking into account physical, environmental or economic limits on operation, and also accounting for uncertainty in system models or physical measurements. Particular problems are how to build guarantees of stability and constraint satisfaction into control algorithms and how to keep their computational complexity within reasonable limits. I am interested in applications in power generation, robotics and process industries as well as econometric systems.