It was wonderful to represent the Connect Lab at the 23rd IFAC World Congress in Busan, Korea. The week brought together excellent technical discussions, the excitement of seeing my students present their work at a major international conference for the first time, and the chance to reconnect with old friends from across the control community.
Zamir Martinez presenting at IFAC 2026. Photo: 1yen/Flickr.
Zamir Martinez presented “Symmetry-Based Formation Control on Cycle Graphs Using Dihedral Point Groups.” His work develops a symmetry-based approach to formation control: by enforcing reflection symmetries and anchoring only one agent to a mirror axis, the method generates a class of dihedrally symmetric formations using just (n-1) communication links. The framework guarantees exponential convergence and extends to maneuvering formations. The paper is available here: PDF.
Solomon Goldgraber Casspi presenting at IFAC 2026. Photo: Flickr.
Solomon Goldgraber Casspi presented “The Geometry of Hidden Modes in Distance-Based Formation Control.” His talk showed how geometry reveals motions in a formation that can remain hidden from a local actuator. The work characterizes these uncontrollable modes through global and local rotational subspaces and connects that geometry directly to disturbance rejection, showing that a formation’s recovery can depend critically on the direction in which it is disturbed. The paper is available here: PDF.
Before the Congress, I spoke at the workshop “Alternative Representations for Control: Neuromorphic, Data-driven, and Moment-based Methods,” alongside many researchers whose work I greatly admire. My talk, “Efficient Inference of Interaction Graphs in Nonlinear Multi-Agent Networks,” asked a basic question about networked systems: if we can perturb a network and observe its response, can we determine who is interacting with whom? I discussed how steady-state probing and passivity-based convergence guarantees can efficiently recover the topology and interaction weights of nonlinear multi-agent networks, including what is and is not possible when measurements and actuation are limited. It was especially nice to revisit these excellent results from the work of my former student Miel Sharf.
A Korean barbecue dinner before the Congress. Photo: 1yen/Flickr.
The Congress was also a welcome opportunity to spend time with longtime colleagues and friends. A particular highlight was catching up with Shiyu Zhao, my first postdoctoral researcher, at the opening reception.
Shiyu Zhao and Daniel Zelazo at the opening reception. Photo: 1yen/Flickr.
Congratulations to Zamir and Solomon on their presentations. It was a memorable week of research, friendship, and community in Busan.