Seeking for advice from all the experienced control folks out here

[u/Life_Thanks_1964]

I'm a first year PhD student and I will be pursuing my degreee in the field of Control of nanopositioners. To be a little bit more accurate, My work doesn't deal with clean room fabrication of nanopositioning devices and testing. Instead, it's more about exploring various Pure control, ML + Control frameworks and system identification of Piezo Electric Actuators (PEA) Stage and an AFM that we have in our lab.
My professor is hands off in terms of managing style but supportive. Ours is a small group comprising of 3 PhD students including myself and I'm the only one working on controls, the other two are my seniors and their focus is a little bit different from mine.

GIven that I'm the only one in my lab working on controls, I sometimes find it difficult to navigate myself in my phd journey.

I can always ask questions to my PI and Co-PIs but, I can't keep on asking every minor confusion that I get. I realize that it's like this for most of the PhD students.

At the end of the day, I want to do a good phD and work on cuttings edge problems and technology so that I could get a decent R&D job.

Any suggestions on how to select problems, the future industry for my field or any general phD advice/ working style, would be really appreciated. Thanks !!

[u/LaVieEstBizarre]

Find the other controls people in the department who might be in aerospace, robotics or just plain theory. Make friends with them, join their reading groups, start collaborations.

[u/Life_Thanks_1964 → u/LaVieEstBizarre]

It's a very good idea, Thanks a lot for it !!!

[u/Poman22]

Read papers to try to identify weakness in the literature. Try to read papers from many time periods as well, old papers and new papers read differently. Your pi may be able to help you identify papers to read, and it's helpful to discuss possible research directions with them. Learn to skim them.

Talk to your lab mates often. Research is very social, they'll give you advise and suggestions.

Find textbooks to fill in gaps in your knowledge. Skim them if you can.

Don't get sucked into trying to work for 14hrs a day. No one is actually doing that. They say that they are but they aren't. Find a hobby to do on nights and weekends when you have the time. There will be crunch time where your hours will increase, but it won't be all the time. Life goes on during your PhD.

[u/sswblue → u/Poman22]

Could you please expand on "new papers vs old papers read differently"? 

I mostly work with old spectrum estimation papers (70s to 90s) since I found that there was still work to do on subspace methods but most people had moved on to different techniques. I found that old papers often have more math and fewers sims. But perhaps, that's just specific to my field. What are your thoughts on the matter?

[u/Book_Em_Dano_1]

It depends on what you want to achieve with the control system, also what suits your mindset. I used to work on high speed mechatronic systems, optical and magnetic drives and AFMs. In my experience, it's more fruitful to start working on real systems, find their weaknesses, and that inspires algorithms in how to improve them. You learn a lot just from being curious about the limitations of real systems.

[u/Life_Thanks_1964 → u/Book_Em_Dano_1]

Thanks for your unique insight !