Hybrid system design and embedded controller synthesis for multi-modal control

Based on operational, financial and environmental considerations, large scale systems such as automated highway systems, air traffic management systems, and unmanned aerial vehicle networks have been advocated to have higher levels of automation. By nature the systems are distributed and highly dynamic, the environments around the systems are rapidly changing, and multi-objective design specifications intensify the complexity of system design. To manage the design complexity, multimodal control paradigm, in which control systems are designed by hierarchically nesting of composition of modes of operation such that each mode of operation is designed to cope with a designated scenario with respect to a design specification while the organization of modes of operation depends on the ordering of these specifications, is proposed.; A multi-modal control system can be modeled as a hierarchical nesting of parallel and serial composition of discrete and continuous components. A model of computation (MOC) governs the behaviors and interactions of components at each level of the hierarchy. The control system is a hybrid system which is composed of different MOCs. The formal synthesis of embedded controllers is interpreted as the generation of an architecture mapping from discrete-continuous components to hardware-software components to ensure that the implementations are correct by construction.; This dissertation is focused on a formal approach of hybrid system design and embedded controller synthesis for multi-modal control. Throughout the dissertation, a helicopter based unmanned aerial vehicle is used as a design example. First, modal controllers based on feedback linearization and differential flatness for a nonlinear non-minimum phase helicopter model are designed. Second, a general framework is developed for the derivation of control modes switching which satisfy reachability specifications. Third, embedded system synthesis based on a formal methodology is presented. Various MOCs are used and translated in different design stages according to the design properties of MOCs. Depending on the choice of architecture, the components specified by the MOCs are then mapped to hardware and software components.