Many aspects of our everyday life are influenced by automation and control. These are fundamental to any system or device – mechanical or electronic – sensing changes in conditions to automatically adjust in real-time.

From air conditioners and traffic lights to smart cities and car cruise control, a well-designed control system should be robust, reliable, efficient and choose corrective actions based on available data.

Today’s society is facing a broad range of unprecedented challenges when it comes to climate change, ageing populations and the need to protect ourselves from cybersecurity issues in a digital world.

As our world continues to modernise, control system design will have transformative, real-world impacts in enabling technology to address many of these challenges.

We deliver world-class research in the areas of control theory, quantum control engineering, applied mathematics, quantum optics, machine learning and control systems engineering. Our research strengths include:

• estimation and control theory to improve the precision and reliability of quantum optical systems
• robust control of flexible structures and atomic force microscopy
• optimisation and distributed control of power and renewable energy systems
• distributed estimation in large scale networks.

We undertake fundamental research into the theory of automatic systems and control. Our team develops fundamental theories as well as novel principles and methodologies to create new opportunities in a range of control systems engineering areas.

The Systems & Control group at UNSW Canberra is known internationally for its contributions to the quantum, robust, and stochastic control and filtering theories. Recognised as world-class, these theories have applications across power engineering, unmanned vehicles, atomic force microscopy, and quantum optics.

Research projects:

• Optimisation methods for coherent quantum signal processing estimation and filtering.
• Efficient and High-precision System Identification in Quantum Cybernetics.
• Efficient Parameter Identification and Robust Control of Quantum Systems.