I attended the 2016 American Control Conference in Boston. A wonderful city, beautiful weather, and as usual, a well organized event. The banquet at the New England Aquarium was a particularly nice touch!

On the research side of things, in addition to the many great talks I attended, I particularly enjoyed two semi-plenary lectures on robotics. The first, by Neville Hogan (MIT), was about the challenges of building and controlling therapeutic robots, e.g. for helping a stroke patient re-learn how to walk. It turns out the robots are only part of the equation — the real mystery is that we still don’t really understand the human brain’s role in walking. This makes re-learning even more difficult! The second talk, by Aaron Ames (Georgia Tech) was about having robots do the walking themselves. This is also a very challenging problem and it’s encouraging to see the tremendous progress that has been made even over the past decade. Aaron’s talk featured many videos of walking robots from his lab and even a live demonstration!