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, and holds a passion for mathematics education for engineers. He is currently a Member of Technical Staff at MDA Ltd., where he applies his software development, robotics and control theory experience to the analysis of mission operations with the CanadArm 2 and research & development of future technologies for the new CanadArm 3 on the Gateway station.
Aircraft orientation control animation.
Underactuated control — two inputs, pitch and yaw — point the nose of the body down. The uncontrolled rotation about the body's forward axis is compensated for using the other two control actions.

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Rollen graduated in 2017 with his Bachelors of Software Engineering (BSE). He completed a number of cooperative work terms in the software engineering field with applications in game development, media programming and application programming. He complemented his degree with a joint honours in Applied Mathematics. This experience drove his interest towards the general mathematics of control theory and its applications to robotics and aerospace. During his PhD, Rollen investigated an 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.