This thesis presents mathematical modeling and control techniques that can be used to predict and specify performance of biologically inspired actuation systems called cellular actuators. Cellular actuators are modular units designed to be connected in bundles in manner similar to human muscle fibers. They are characterized by inherent compliance and large numbers of on-off discrete control inputs. In this thesis, mathematical tools are developed that connect the performance to the physical manifestation of the device. A camera positioner inspired by the human eye is designed to demonstrate how these tools can be used to create an actuator with a useful force-displacement characteristic. Finally, control architectures are presented that use discrete switching inputs to produce smooth motion of these systems despite an innate tendency toward oscillation. These are demonstrated in simulation and experiment.

The enhancement of the reliability, security, and resiliency of electric power systems depends on the availability of fast, accurate, and robust dynamic state estimators. These estimators should be robust to gross errors on the measurements and the model parameter values while providing good state estimates even in the presence of large dynamical system model uncertainties and non-Gaussian thick-tailed process and observation noises. It turns out that the current Kalman filter-based dynamic state estimators given in the literature suffer from several important shortcomings, precluding them from being adopted by power utilities for practical applications. To be specific, they cannot handle (i) dynamic model uncertainty and parameter errors; (ii) non-Gaussian process and observation noise of the system nonlinear dynamic models; (iii) three types of outliers; and (iv) all types of cyber attacks. The three types of outliers, including observation, innovation, and structural outliers are caused by either an unreliable dynamical model or real-time synchrophasor measurements with data quality issues, which are commonly seen in the power system. To address these challenges, we have pioneered a general theoretical framework that advances both robust statistics and robust control theory for robust dynamic state and parameter estimation of a cyber-physical system. Specifically, the generalized maximum-likelihood-type (GM)-estimator, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and the H-infinity filter are integrated into a unified framework to yield various centralized and decentralized robust dynamic state estimators. These new estimators include the GM-iterated extended Kalman filter (GM-IEKF), the GM-UKF, the H-infinity UKF and the robust H-infinity UKF. The GM-IEKF is able to handle observation and innovation outliers but its statistical efficiency is low in the presence of non-Gaussian system process and measurement noise. The GM-UKF addresses this issue and achieves a high statistical efficiency under a broad range of non-Gaussian process and observation noise while maintaining the robustness to observation and innovation outliers. A reformulation of the GM-UKF with multiple hypothesis testing further enables it to handle structural outliers. However, the GM-UKF may yield biased state estimates in presence of large system uncertainties. To this end, the H-infinity UKF that relies on robust control theory is proposed. It is shown that H-infinity is able to bound the system uncertainties but lacks of robustness to outliers and non-Gaussian noise. Finally, the robust H-infinity filter framework is proposed that leverages the H-infinity criterion to bound system uncertainties while relying on the robustness of GM-estimator to filter out non-Gaussian noise and suppress outliers. Furthermore, these new robust estimators are applied for system bus frequency monitoring and control and synchronous generator model parameter calibration. Case studies of several different IEEE standard systems show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed estimators. / Ph. D.