SPECIAL SESSION

Session 1

In today’s engineering market, a number of employment opportunities are available for students graduating with their doctorate degree. This Student Affairs sponsored session features a panel whose members have had a variety of work experiences ranging from academia, industry, post doc, and national laboratory positions. Each panel member will present a focused overview of their career paths and lessons learned that will be followed by a lively question/answer period with session participants. Plan to attend to gain further information regarding career opportunities and share your perspectives on the evolving global Dynamic Systems & Controls engineering workforce.

Session 2

Program managers from various federal funding agencies have been invited to participate in this special session to describe their program emphasis, funding priorities, and proposal mechanism. The presentations will be followed by an open question and answer period.

Session 3

Mechatronics has become one of the most significant engineering application fields emerging in the digital age. Engineers from Maplesoft and Quanser will demonstrate the newest techniques and concepts for modern mechatronic design utilized by researchers worldwide.

Efficient high-fidelity modeling of physical systems:

Through demonstration of the modeling software MapleSim, attendees will see how they can quickly develop high-fidelity plant models for mechatronics and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) applications.  The techniques and examples are drawn from real industrial and research applications in automotive, aerospace, and robotics among others. Key to the techniques will be symbolic computation-based model derivation. These new techniques automate the development of complete, and accessible, model equations for the plant models. Additionally, symbolic techniques can perform model simplifications and optimized plant code generation for HIL applications. The ultimate goal is to produce high-fidelity physical models that run sufficiently fast in real-time, enabling a wide range of new applications that were simply impossible with traditional techniques.

Advancing innovation through mechatronic design:

This segment of the session highlights the essential techniques of efficient mechatronic design. Attendees will see the latest mechatronic HIL experiments and research platforms used for cutting-edge research. Planned HIL experiments will be drawn from advanced mechatronics, UAV systems and collaborative multi-vehicle control, and robotics research. Additionally, this session will highlight how innovative educators can introduce mechatronic design into their teaching process and create truly open and effective learning environments for graduate students.

Session 4

This workshop is a part of the 2011 ACC. The purpose of this event is to increase the general awareness of the importance of systems and control technology and its cross-disciplinary nature among high school teachers and students. Workshop activities include presentations by control scholars, informal discussions, and provides an opportunity for high school students and their teachers to meet passionate researchers and educators from academia and industry. The talks are designed to be educational, inspirational, and entertaining showing the excitement of being a control engineer. This event follows a series of similar successful events and celebrates the 11th Anniversary of the Control Systems Society and American Automatic Control Council Outreach Program.

Session 5

This Special Education Session will focus on multiple challenges and opportunities that are presented to young investigators preparing for careers in science and engineering and will address important control engineering education issues of balancing math, science and technology in engineering education. Invited international control engineering scholars and educators from academia and industry will share a word of wisdom in addressing the following and other related questions: How do we integrate research and education? What we, scientists and educators, should do about cultivating student interest in science, math and engineering? Is it important for control engineering students to know math and science? Should control engineering education focus mostly on engineering? What kind of control engineering textbooks are popular among students? Do they need textbooks? This event follows a series of similar successful events and celebrates the 11th Anniversary of the Control Systems Society and American Automatic Control Council Outreach Program.  This special Session will also revisit the project "Plain Talk on Systems & Control for a Wide Range of the Public" initiated at the 2006 CDC in New Orleans and discuss the follow up project. One of the major challenges for the controls community is to enhance its own public image and convey the essence and contribution of the field to outsiders; for this, coordinated effort has to take place.  The purpose of this follow up project is to prepare “Plain Talk about the Power, Beauty and Excitement of the Cross Boundaries Nature of the Systems & Control for the Non-Control Engineering Audience.”  A sample of short talks given at various workshops for high school teachers and students as well as for a target audience of non-control engineering professionals and the general public will be presented and discussed.