Modeling, Dynamics and Control Lab (MDCL)

 Selected NEWS and ANNOUNCEMENTS

• [Fall 2025] Dr. Eisa's work on "a new paradigm" for how flapping insects and hummingbirds stabilize their hovering has been featured by the Physics magazine by the American Physical society (APS), which highlights the best peer-reviewed publications by APS with breakthrough, changing perspective results (click here).

• [Fall 2025] The experimental work of Ahmed Elgohary and Rohan Palanikumar to experimentally demonstrate our "new paradigm" on model-free, real-time stable hovering and source seeking is highlighted by UC News (click here).

• [Fall 2025] Dr. Eisa and Ahmed Elgohary published a paper on Physical Revie E (click here) on "a new paradigm" for how flapping insects and hummingbirds stabilize their hovering in real-time and with limited computational abilities. We show that with the natural oscillations of the wing motion, very simple feedback sensations (natural as well as observed by biologists) lead to robust stabilization.  

• Fall 2025] MSN highlights our research on mimicking dynamic soaring using our model-free, real-time, sensation-based extremum seeking approach (click here). 

• [Fall 2025] Science and industry writers such as earth.com highlights our research on mimicking dynamic soaring using our research funded by DARPA (click here). 

• [Summer 2025] Dr. Eisa received a DARPA grant (his share is ~$700k) in collaboration with industrial teams and other academic institutions to test, validate and experiment Dr. Eisa's recent breakthrough in characterizing dynamic soaring as a natural model-free, real-time extremum seeking system. The project will aim to mimic dynamic soaring, including real flight tests by UAVs. More on this is highlighted by UC news (click here).

• [Summer 2025] Ahmed Elgohary presented his recent research on extremum seeking for controlled vibrational stabilization at the SIAM CT 2025 mini-symposium co-organized by Dr. Eisa for geometric control methods and estimation.

• [Summer 2025] Dr. Eisa presented a paper at IFAC NOLCOS 2025 and co-organized a mini-symposium on geometric control methods and estimation at the SIAM Conference on Control and its Application 2025.

• [Summer 2025] Ahmed Elgohary successfully passed the candidacy exam, becoming a PhD candidate. Congratulations, Ahmed!

• [Summer 2025] Hesham was chosen and selected to attend the fully funded and competitive Annual Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling camp organized by SIAM. Congratulations, Hesham! 

• [Summer 2025] Dr. Martini joined our group as a postdoctoral fellow. Welcome, Dr.Martini!

• [Summer 2025] Dr. Eisa was invited by the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria where he gave a seminar and was hosted by peers to explore future collaborations. 

• [Summer 2025] Rolf joined our group for summer co-op research. Welcome, Rolf!

• [Spring 2025] Ahmed, along with Dr. Eisa, published a new model-free extremum seeking method for controlled vibrational stabilization of mechanical systems (such as systems described by equations of motion resulting from Newton's second law or Euler-Lagrange formulations), which can be applied to many physical, biological and engineering systems; the new method provides for the first time in literature a framework for model-free source-seeking by flapping systems (click here). 

• [Spring 2025] Hesham passes his dissertation proposal defense.

• [Fall 2024] Hesham, along with Dr. Eisa and his collaborator Dr. Stechlinski, published a new theoretical result that enables sensitivity rank condition to check parameter identifiability, for the first time, of smooth and nonsmooth differential algebraic systems. This also enables a new parametric reduction technique, which can be useful in modeling many physical phenomena and applications (click here).   

• [Fall 2024] Hesham Abdelfattah successfully passed the candidacy exam, becoming a PhD candidate. Congratulations, Hesham!

• [Summer 2024] Ahmed led experimental validation work (robotic experiments to test our developed Geometric-based Kalman Filtering known as GEKF and its use in model-free, real-time extremum seeking leading to asymptotic convergence and better handeling of noise! Great work, Ahmed! (click here for the YouTube channel). Check out our European Control Conference paper on the topic (click here).

• [Summer 2024] Shivam defended his MS thesis successfully. Congratulations, Shivam!

• [Summer 2024] Dr. Eisa attended the European Control Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and presented two of the group's papers.

• [Summer 2024] Sameer Pokharel defended his PhD successfully. Congratulations Dr. Pokhrel!

• [Summer 2024] Hesham presented some of our research results in new nonsmooth identifiability and observability methods with application to climate modeling at the SIAM conference on mathematics of planet earth in Portland, Oregon.

• [Summer 2024] Our work for characterizing, for the first time in literature, the optimized physics of soaring birds as an extremum seeking system phenomenon has been highlighted and featured by Gulfstream in its international magazine of NONSTOOP.

• [Spring 2024] In a collaborative, across states project led by Dr. Eisa (total $300k), we were awarded one of the NSF very competitive (only 4-10 awards/year) AMPS grants by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS); first award from AMPS, NSF to any research-group/institution in the state of Ohio. The award aims to support our research in developing theory and methods for control systems exhibiting nonsmooth/extreme behavior with application to wind turbines.

• [Spring 2024] Hesham won the competitive SIAM travel award to present his research at the SIAM conference on Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE), June, 2024 in Portland, Oregon. Congratulations, Hesham!

• [Spring 2024] Dr. Eisa was invited and celebrated by the office of research as one of the URC awardees.

• [Spring 2024] Sameer won the most prestigious graduate student award at the college of engineering and applied science (CEAS) at UC: the engineer of the month award. Congratulations, Sameer! (click here)

• [Spring 2024] Our group had two papers accepted for publications in the European Control Conference (ECC) 2024. Dr. Eisa will present the two papers in Stockholm, Sweden, June 2024.

• [Spring 2024] Rohan Palanikumar joins our group as an MS student. Welcome, Rohan!

• [Fall 2023] Sameer and Dr. Eisa has their paper on introducing Geometric-based Extended Kalman Filter (GEKF) accepted and published in the international journal, of control, systems and automation by Springer (click here).

• [Fall 2023] Our group has multiple AIAA SciTech papers accepted and to be presented in AIAA SciTech 2024. Ben, Ahmed, Sameer went to the conference for presentation.

• [Fall 2023] Sameer got married. Congratulations, Sameer!

• [Summer 2023] Dr. Eisa was selected for an early career travel award from SIAM-NSF and the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), Tokyo-Japan to present the breakthrough of using geometric control theory and extremum seeking systems to resolve the century-long problem of the optimized flight physics by soaring birds and present such tools for the biomathematics and Life Science communities.

• [Summer 2023] Ahmed got married. Congratulations, Ahmed!

• [Summer 2023] Sameer and Hesham along with Dr. Eisa attended the SIAM conference on control and its application (CT23) in Philadelphia, PA. They all presented in a mini-symposium co-organized by Dr. Eisa and his collaborator Dr. Peter Stechlinski from the University of Maine. In SIAM CT23, Sameer presented our published paper in SIAM proceedings on developing theory and method for control-affine extremum seeking systems with attenuating oscillations (click here).

• [Summer 2023] Sameer was chosen and selected to attend the fully funded and competitive Annual Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling camp organized by SIAM. Congratulations, Sameer! 

• [Summer 2023] Paulo joined our group for summer co-op research. Welcome, Paulo!

• [Summer 2023] Sameer won the competitive SIAM student travel award to attend and present a contributed presentation for our paper that is accepted in the SIAM conference on control and its applications in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Congratulations, Sameer!

• [Summer 2023] Dr. Eisa accompanied by Hesham, Sameer, Ahmed, Shivam, and Prof. Abdallah attended the UC Academic Advising Association where Dr. Eisa received an official certificate for his nomination.

• [Spring 2023] Sameer passes his dissertation proposal defense.

• [Spring 2023] Timothy Pierce finished his MS project and graduated: Modeling and Simulation of Flapping Wings.

• [Spring 2023] Dr. Eisa gave a tutorial at the IEEE Green Technologies 2023 conference on extremum seeking methods and their applications in renewable energies. Dr. Eisa received the IEEE tutorial speaker award.

• [Spring 2023] Hesham and Dr. Eisa attended the IEEE Green Technologies 2023 conference in Denver, CO. Hesham presented a paper and Dr. Eisa was the awards chair of the conference.

• [Spring 2023] Dr. Eisa was awarded the University Research Council (URC) scholar faculty, the university’s oldest and most prestigious internal funding program recognizing promising early-career individual faculty at UC proposing transformative, future-shaping ideas (click here).   

• [Spring 2023] Dr. Eisa was nominated for the UC Academic Advising Association for the outstanding first-year Advocate award.

• [Spring 2023] Sameer Pokhrel passed his qualification exam and became a Ph.D. candidate. Congratulations, Sameer!

• [Spring 2023] SIAM News published an article highlighting our time-domain, mathematically well-posed, accurate, wind turbines modeling effort: https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/accurate-mathematical-modeling-of-wind-turbines-improves-their-implementation
  *The college of engineering and applied science (CEAS) highlighted us in UC News (click here).

• [Spring 2023] Ahmed Elgohary joined our group as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Ahmed!

• [On Christmas 2022] Dr. Eisa and Sameer have their paper accepted in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics (click here) solving the decades-long problem of the optimized flight physics of soaring birds by decoding the mysterious biological phenomenon as an extremum seeking system thanks to the elegant analysis done via geometric control theory. 

• [Fall 2022] SIAM News published a news article on the latest significant results by Sameer and Dr. Eisa on the very novel results on the flight physics of albatrosses: https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/albatross-optimized-flight-physics-a-natural-extremum-seeking-system
  Our lab compiled two videos for the article and for explaining the concepts:
  1. Dynamic Soaring: How albatrosses optimize their flight physics? (click here)
  2. Is Dynamic Soaring by Albatross an Extremum Seeking System Manifestation in Nature? (click here)
  *The collage of engineering and applied science (CEAS) highlighted us in UC News (click here).

• [Fall 2022] Sameer and Dr. Eisa published their novel results in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (click here) providing a new hypothesis that the albatross optimized flight can be simulated as a classic extremum-seeking system structure.

• [Fall 2022] Dr. Eisa joined the Technical Committee of the 15th annual IEEE Conference on Green Technologies 2023.

• [Fall 2022] Hesham Abdelfattah and Benjamin Moidel joined our group as new Ph.D. students. Welcome Hesham and Ben! 

• [Summer 2022] The MDCL was represented in the major gathering of SIAM 2022 conferences of the annual meeting, life sciences, and mathematics for planet Earth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with three contributed presentations.

• [Summer 2022] Sameer won the competitive SIAM student travel award to attend and present a contributed presentation at the SIAM conference on life science. Congratulations, Sameer!

• [Summer 2022] Dr. Eisa gave an invited seminar to the Airforce Research Lab (ARFL) control group on May 2022.

• [Summer 2022] Ariana and Alex joined our group for summer co-op research. Welcome Ariana and Alex!

• [Spring 2022] Dr. Eisa won the faculty development award at UC for the summer of 2022.

• [Spring 2022] Dr. Eisa gave a presentation and chaired a session at the IEEE Green Technologies Conference 2022. Here is the conference paper  [link]

• [In 2021] Dr. Eisa published a new paper in communications in nonlinear science and numerical simulations, Elsevier, [link].

• [In 2021] Dr. Eisa published a new paper in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, IOPscience, [link]. 

 Primary focus of the MDCL research:

• Dynamical Systems and Control Theory: Nonlinear dynamics theory, stability and sensitivity, averaging theory, linear and nonlinear controllability, geometric control theory, vibrational stabilization, bifurcation, multiple time scales, and numerical methods and simulations.

• Mathematical Modeling, Engineering Systems/Applications, and Control Systems: Modeling, formulation, simulation and experimentation of engineering systems, dynamics and control of unmanned aerial vehicles, control systems in renewable energies, power and energy systems, modeling wind turbines, and bio-inspired robotics.

• Signal Processing and Imaging: Signal analysis and image processing.