A Full-Day Pre-Congress Workshop for 2026 IFAC World Congress

Learning from Data: Principles, Methods, and Emerging Ideas & Applications in Iterative Learning Control  

Sunday, 23 August 2026

Busan, Republic of Korea


Organizers:

Workshop Outline:

Data-driven learning control has emerged as a powerful framework for achieving high-performance operation in complex, uncertain, and repetitive systems. By exploiting historical data, system models, and online measurements, such controllers can adapt, optimise, and progressively improve performance over time. Iterative learning control (ILC) and related approaches have been successfully applied across a wide range of domains, including robotics, precision manufacturing, autonomous systems, chemical process control, and rehabilitation, particularly in settings where accurate system models are difficult to obtain and the tasks are inherently repetitive. 

This full-day workshop aims to provide participants with a comprehensive overview of the principles, design methods, and emerging applications in data-driven learning control. The workshop will: 

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a clear understanding of data-driven learning control frameworks, the ability to connect theoretical concepts with practical applications, and insight into future research opportunities in this rapidly evolving field. 

Desired Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the workshop, the audience will be able to: 

Intended Audience and Desired Prerequisite:

learning-based and repetitive control at major international conferences, including the American Control Conference (ACC), the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), and the IFAC World Congress 2017. These sessions have consistently been well attended, typically attracting 35–40 participants, with balanced participation from North America, Europe, and Asia, demonstrating sustained community interest and broad international appeal.

A related workshop was presented at the IFAC World Congress 2017, where the primary emphasis was on recent theoretical developments. In contrast, the proposed IFAC 2026 workshop adopts a distinctly different and more application-oriented focus. While fundamental principles and dominant design frameworks of data driven learning control are introduced, the workshop places particular emphasis on practical implementations, case studies, and real-world deployment challenges. 

By foregrounding applications and practical insights, the IFAC 2026 workshop aims to broaden its appeal to both academic researchers and practitioners, and to demonstrate how data-driven learning control methods are being translated into impactful engineering solutions. 

Speakers:

Workshop Schedule (Tentative):