Ravi N Banavar

"Be the change you wish to see in others"

Institute Chair 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


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

Fax : (91) - (22) - 2572 0057


Email : banavarATiitb.ac.in 


Upcoming events: 

2.  A 2-day workshop on "Observer and Control Design for Autonomous Vehicles" - Nov. 22 and 23, 2024, at IIT 

     Bombay. More details will appear by the end of February 2024.


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: 


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

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

     (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


Recent results


Attitude Tracking Control for Aerobatic Helicopters: A Geometric Approach

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.08800 

https://youtu.be/1zz71W__RNA


Upcoming events


Course for Spring 2024 at IIT-B:


SC 651 - Estimation on Lie Groups- (Mon, Thur: 5.30 PM to 7.00 PM ), Hybrid mode(official slot: 12

Venue: LT 005

TAs for the course: Viyom Vivek and Srishti Siddharth

Course outline.  Video lectures