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Ravi N Banavar

"Be the change you wish to see in others"

Professor, Systems and Control Engineering, IIT Bombay

Guest Professor, IIT Gandhinagar,

Adjunct Professor, IIT Palakkad

210, Systems and Control Engineering

(Near the Central Library)

I. I. T. - Bombay

Powai, Mumbai 400 076

Office : (91) - (22) - 2576 7888

Email : banavarATiitb.ac.in,ravi.banavarATgmail.com

Recent visitors: Florentina Nicolau (ENSEA, Cergy, Paris), Constantin Morarescu (University of Lorraine), Zhong-Ping Jiang (New York University)

Recent academic pursuits: Investigating (1) geometric control laws in a coordinate-free setting for constrained mechanical systems and a network of agents, (2) computing explicit bounds in the inverse function theorem and the implicit function theorem, and exploring applications that benefit from these, (3) exploring various facets of the discrete time Maximum Principle, with particular emphasis on frequency constraints, rate constraints and numerical techniques to solve two-point boundary value problems, (4) estimation algorithms on Lie groups - theory and computation.

Recent events, visitors and talks:

An invited talk at Plaksha University, Chandigarh, April 2, 2025 - Perspectives in Control; The Joy of Feedback
10 Lectures at IISER, Mohali (Department of Mathematics) March 27th to April 9th, 2025, as part of their course on Lie Groups.
A popular talk in the IE-OR department in their stORIEs and snacks seminar series, February 13, 2025. (Talk.)

Paper presented at the IEEE CDC, 2024, Milano: "Estimates on the Domain of Validity for Lyapunov-Schmidt Reduction." (Talk.)
An invited talk in the Mechanical and Aerosapce Engineering Department at NTU, Singapore, Dec 9th, 2024 (sponsored by Delta Corp Lab) - Retraction maps, feedback linearization and nonholonomic integrators, (Talk)

Semi-plenary talk at the 26th International Symposium on the Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS2024), Cambridge, August 19-23, 2024: "The Ubiquity of Lie Groups and their Applications."
A 2-day workshop on "Observer and Control Design for Autonomous Vehicles" - Nov. 22 and 23, 2024, at IIT Bombay. Please check this link.
Pre-conference workshop at the European Control Conference, June 2024, Stockholm, Sweden: Geometric Observers on Manifolds and Lie Groups (June 25th, 2024.) Please check this link. My talk here.
A talk at the IFAC Workshop on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Methods in Nonlinear Control, Besançon, France, June 2024. Talk.
An Institute Colloquium at IIT Mandi "My 30-year journey in "Control", IIT Mandi, March 17, 2024. My talk.
A popular talk in the Department of Mathematics, Delhi University, North Campus, February 16, 2024.
Two talks in the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi, February 15 and 16, 2024, on: Lie Groups and their Applications
Talk on "Explicit Bounds in the Implicit and Inverse Function Theorem and their Applications, Workshop on Geometrically Guided Analysis and Design in Optimization and Control, " NTU, Singapore, Dec 9th and 10th, 2023.
Lectures on Multiagent Systems and Social Networks by Constantin Morarescu, Oct 11, 12, 13, 2023.
A 2-day workshop for graduate students across institutes to enable exchange of ideas and intermingling - Sept. 15, 16, 2023.
A set of 3 lectures on "Differential Flatness and Control," by Florentina Nicolau FL-Diff-Flatness, September 2023.
A 4-day workshop on Mechanics and Control, MechCon2023, held at IIT Bombay, March 15-18, 2023.
Consensus and Synchronization: From Laplacian Flow and Kuramoto Oscillator to Lie Groups:

RB-CCPS-Oct2022 (At the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, IISc, Blore (October14, 2022))

Geometric PID Controller for Constrained Mechanical Systems on Lie Groups

Talk at U Lorraine (At the University of Lorraine (May 2022): )

Geometric Second Order Laplacian Flow for Consensus on Lie Groups

(Joint work with a doctoral student: Talk to be delivered at the ECC 2022 (London): ECC2022-London

(This paper won the second prize from three in the Best Students' Paper Award category at the

Conference.)

An interesting set of 4 lectures on Differential Geometry and Lie Groups: An informal set of 4 lectures

on Differential Geometry and Lie Groups delivered by my doctoral student, Rama Seshan Chandrasekharan, in Dec 2022,

to an audience of eager-to-learn undergraduates and graduates from IITB, IITD, IITK, IITM, IITGan and IITPkd. Here is the link.

A write-up on the Systems and Control group in the IEEE Control Systems magazine

"Systems and Control, IIT Bombay" in the series Institutes in Control of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 94-97, Feb. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MCS.2022.3216692.

Reflections on our group here: An interview with the IEEE Control Systems magazine

"Ravi N. Banavar [People in Control]," in IEEE Control Systems Magazine, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 23-25, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1109/MCS.2019.2950488.

A wee bit of pride:

Runner-up, Best Student's Paper Award, European Control Conference, London, July 15,2022.

Rama Seshan Chandrasekharan, Ravi N Banavar and Arun D Mahindrakar

Geometric Second-Order Laplacian Flow for Consensus on Lie Groups

Automatica Paper prize: The article, "A discrete-time Pontryagin maximum principle on matrix Lie groups,"

(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2018.08.026) by Karmvir Singh Phogat (https://sites.google.com/view/karmvirs-homepage/home) who worked with Debasish Chatterjee and me during his doctoral studies, is one of the three papers to receive the Automatica Paper Prize for the years 2018-2020(https://www.ifac-control.org/awards/journal-awards). The IFAC journal Automatica is a premier journal in the field of Automatic Control.

Research interests

Optimal control, nonlinear control

Geometric mechanics (Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics)

Estimation on Lie groups

Application areas - Mechanical and aerospace problems (robotics, launch vehicles, spacecrafts), low Reynolds number locomotion

Academic Background

Ph. D. (May 92) - University of Texas at Austin

M. S. (May 88) - Clemson University, Clemson

B. Tech. (July 86) - Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Professional affiliations

Associate Editor, Systems and Control Letters, Elsevier Press

Associate Editor, International Journal of Control, Taylor and Francis.

Technical Associate Editor, IEEE Control Systems Magazine.

A sketch of the content of courses offered

Linear systems theory, vector spaces, nonlinear systems and control, differential geometric methods in control,

geometric mechanics - symmetry and reduction.

Recent presentations and short course modules

A 5-day course on “Applications of Lie Groups,” in October 2023 at IIT-Gandhinagar

The lecture slides are here.

ISRO success stories: (Our long interaction with the Indian Space Research Organization)

Presentation at the ISRO symposium (IIT Madras, Aug 2019) ISRO_IITM_presen

A 10-day course on “Mechanics from a Geometric Viewpoint,” from Aug. 5th to Aug 16th, 2019 at IIT-Bombay

Instructors: Ravi N Banavar and D. H. S. Maithripala

A popular talk: Parallel parking, falling cats, spherical robots and differential geometry, Feb 2017 (RNB_IIT_GN_popular_talk)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/TMlOUF5hxts

Two talks on Feedback Linearization delivered at IIT-Kanpur, September 2016

http://www.iitk.ac.in/tkic/v_control-techniques-and-applications.php

Talks on Nonlinear Controllability delivered at the Winter School on Control and Dynamical Systems, IIT Gandhinagar,

Feb 2016. notes1, notes2

Talks delivered in a research symposium in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc, Feb 2016.

CMGs_arjun_banavar, sneha_banavar_multibody