The Illusion of Control

Rollen S. D'Souza
Rollen S. D'Souza holds a PhD and BSE from the University of Waterloo. He is interested in geometry and its applications to engineering problems, especially in robotics. Nowadays, he is a Member of Technical Staff at MDA Space Ltd., where he applies his software development, robotics and control theory experience to mission analysis software for CanadArm 2 and R&D of future technologies for the new CanadArm 3. His primary role is as the technical lead for the path planning software component of CanadArm3's ground mission planning software.
Aircraft orientation control animation.
Underactuated control action — pitch and yaw — points the nose of the spacecraft body downward. The uncontrolled rotation about the body's forward axis (roll) is compensated for using the other two control inputs.

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Rollen graduated in 2017 with his Bachelors of Software Engineering (BSE), complemented with a joint honours in Applied Mathematics. He completed a number of internships in the software engineering field with applications in game development, media programming and application programming. During his PhD, Rollen investigated the application of exterior differential systems to solving feedback equivalence problems. In particular, he developed a geometric algorithm for solving a class of feedback linearization problems which subsumes one of the most ubiquitious feedback equivalence problems: state-space, exact feedback linearization. He was supervised by Prof. Chris Nielsen.