Timothy Everett Adams

MacDonald Engineering Building, Room 459

817 Sherbrooke St W

Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0C3

I am completing my Master’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering (Thesis) at McGill University under the supervision of Professor James Richard Forbes at DECAR. My research focuses on interpreting optimization algorithms as control systems.

I obtained my Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University. My capstone project was completed in colaboration with the Interstellar Flight Experimental Research Group under the supervision of Professor Andrew J. Higgins. Moreover, I completed two summer research internships in the Mydlarski Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Laurent Mydlarski.

News

May 10, 2024	Joined DECAR!

Selected Publications

Design of Input-Output Observers for a Population of Systems with Bounded Frequency-Domain Variation using DK-iteration

Timothy Everett Adams and James Richard Forbes

2025

 Abstract  BibTeX  PDF  Code

This paper proposes a linear input-output observer design methodology for a population of systems in which each observer uses knowledge of the linear time-invariant dynamics of the particular device. Observers are typically composed of a known model of the system and a correction mechanism to produce an estimate of the state. The proposed design procedure characterizes the variation within the population in the frequency domain and synthesizes a single robust correction filter. The correction filter is compatible with all system models that satisfy the variation characterization such that a given level of estimation performance is guaranteed. This is accomplished by posing a robust performance problem using the observer error dynamics and solving it using DK-iteration. The design procedure is experimentally demonstrated on a flexible joint robotic manipulator with varied joint stiffnesses. It is shown that the proposed method that uses a single correction filter achieves comparable estimation performance to a method that uses a correction gain tailored toward each joint stiffness configuration.
@misc{adams2025designinputoutputobserverspopulation, title = {Design of Input-Output Observers for a Population of Systems with Bounded Frequency-Domain Variation using $DK$-iteration}, author = {Adams, Timothy Everett and Forbes, James Richard}, year = {2025}, eprint = {2509.07201}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {eess.SY}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07201}, selected = true, bibtex_show = true, }