Robustness is a classical concept in control engineering. A behavior is robust if it persists under the effect of exogenous perturbations or parametric uncertainty.
Enforcing robust stability of a single equilibrium is nowadays a well-understood task. However, tractable tools to design robust non-equilibrium behaviors are lacking, despite non-equilibrium behaviors being pervasive in physics, biology and robotics, among others.
Working on robust dominance theory, I have contributed to developing an interconnection theory geared towards systems that switch and oscillate. The theory demonstrates that behaviors away from equilibrium can be engineered using familiar frequency domain and convex optimization tools.
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