Progress of the Fully Actuated System (FAS) Method

The FAS theory was proposed by Academician Duan Guangren in 2020–2021 as a disruptive theoretical framework for the analysis and design of control systems. Its advent marks a new height for control theory. The framework overcomes key limitations of the traditional state-space approach in handling complex nonlinearity, time variance, and system incompleteness, and it has advanced solutions to robust adaptive control, optimal control, predictive control, tracking control, and other challenging problems. The theory has attracted broad attention across academia and industry. Major progress to date is summarized below.

I. Publications from the Basic Science Center Project Team

In 2022 the team was awarded the Basic Science Center project “High-order FAS Theory and Spacecraft Control Technology.” As of the end of June 2025, according to the Web of Science (WOS) database, the project team has published 538 papers in total, including 420 journal articles and 118 conference papers; among them are 140 papers in IEEE Transactions, 18 in Automatica, 10 in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 15 in Science China (Series F, English Edition), 6 in the English edition of Acta Automatica Sinica, and 11 in Aerospace Science and Technology.

II. Awards and Invited Talks

Project outcomes on the FAS method were selected among the “Top Ten Scientific and Technological Advances in Chinese Universities.” In the NSFC mid-term review of the Basic Science Center project, the team received an excellent evaluation. Core members were invited to deliver 30+ plenary/invited talks on FAS control theory at major domestic and international conferences, including IEEE IECON 2023, IEEE ICRA 2021, IFAC-TDS 2021, and CCC 2021. At the 89th Cross-disciplinary Forum of the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, the FAS talk attracted 390,000 online viewers.

III. Leadership, Special Issues, and Monographs

The pioneering work on the FAS method has inspired 75 PhD dissertations in China (with 22 completed to date). Internationally, scholars from 135 universities and research institutes across 19 countries have published 517 papers related to the FAS method (473 with “Fully Actuated/Quan-qu” explicitly in the title), including 89 IEEE Transactions papers (77 with FAS explicitly in the title). Around the FAS method, five special issues have been launched in journals such as the IFAC flagship journal Control Engineering Practice and the International Journal of Systems Science. In addition, a monograph series with Springer—“Fully Actuated System Methods in Control and Artificial Intelligence”—has started to be published.

IV. Applications of the FAS Method

There are now 141 journal papers reporting applications based on the FAS method, 53 of which include experimental results. Current application domains include, but are not limited to, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aerospace vehicles, industrial robots and manipulators, and high-speed trains. Moreover, the FAS method has demonstrated clear advantages in hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight experiments for a certain domestic aircraft model.

V. Academic Bodies and Institutions

Multiple academic bodies and institutions named after this original method by Chinese scholars have been established, including the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of FAS Control Theory and Technology, the internationally influential International Annual Conference on FAS Theory and Applications, and two technical committees on “FAS Theory and Applications” under the Chinese Association of Automation and the Asian Control Association, respectively. Internationally, a university-level research center titled “FAS Control Technology” has also been set up.

VI. Citations of Representative Papers

Among the six representative papers, the first comes from the initial paper of a three-paper series in Acta Automatica Sinica; papers 2–6 are the first five of a ten-paper series in the International Journal of Systems Science. The first paper of each series was selected as a highly cited paper by CNKI and ESI, respectively. In just four years, these six representative papers have received 1,018 Scopus citations. The FAS method has been acclaimed as a “major discovery,” “significant achievement,” “important milestone,” and as “breaking through the limits of the traditional first-order state-space approach,” “lighting a new direction for control theory.” According to searches by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, within only four years these six papers collectively received 35, 131, 153, and 236 instances of positive evaluation for breakthrough nature, scientific value, originality, and leadership, respectively.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all figures above are up to June 20, 2025.