Plenary Lectures

Professor Hajime Asama
Professor Lei Guo
Professor Thomas Jones
Professor Mustafa Khammash
Professor Naomi E. Leonard
Mr. Jack Little
Dr. Joseph Z. Lu
Professor Richard Murray
Dr. Ernst Scholtz
Dr. David Vos
Dr. Heinrich Frontzek

Robot and remote-controlled machine technology for accident response and decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

Professor Hajime Asama, The University of Tokyo
Monday August 25, 2014 at 18:45, Auditorium 1

Abstract: The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami occurred in March 11, 2011, and as a result, the accident of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant occurred. Utilization of remote-controlled machine technology including robot technology (RT) was essential for the response against the accident to accomplish various tasks in the high-radiation environment. In this presentation, it is introduced how the technology has been utilized in the emergent situation of the accident, and what kind of technology is still demanded for decommissioning. It is also analyzed why the robot technology developed in the past projects in Japan could not be introduced smoothly in the emergent situation, and issues are discussed how we should prepare for the future possible disasters and accidents, including not only technological development but also maintenance of technology, training of operators, establishment of mockups and test fields, and political strategy.

Biography: Hajime Asama received his B. S., M. S., and Dr. Eng. from the University of Tokyo, in 1982, 1984 and 1989, respectively. He worked in The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research from 1986 to 2002. He became a professor of Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 2002, and a professor of School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo since 2009. He received JSME Robotics and Mechatronics Award in 2009, RSJ Distinguished Service Award in 2013.

He was the vice-president of RSJ in 2011-2012. He was an AdCom member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2007 to 2009, the president-elect of Intelligent Autonomous Systems Society from 2012, and an associate editor of a number of journals including Control Engineering Practice, Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, and Journal of Field Robotics. He was the director of the Mobiligence (Emergence of adaptive motor function through the body, brain and environment) program in the MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas from 2005 to 2009. He is a Fellow of JSME and RSJ. Currently, he is the chairman of the Task Force for Remote Control Technology of the council for decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi NPP, the leader of the Project on Disaster Response Robots and of Council on Competitiveness-Japan, and the chairman of Robotics Task Force for Anti-Disaster.

His main research interests are distributed autonomous robotic systems, smart spaces, service engineering, Mobiligence, and service robotics.

Return to TOP

How much uncertainty can the feedback mechanism deal with?

Professor Lei Guo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Wednesday August 27, 2014 at 08:30, Auditorium 1

Abstract: Feedback is ubiquitous and is a core concept in control systems, where the main objective of using feedback is to deal with the influences of various uncertainties on the performance of the dynamical systems to be controlled. Although much progress has been made in control theory over the past 50 years, especially in such areas as adaptive control and robust control, the following fundamental problem remains less explored: How much uncertainty can be dealt with by the feedback mechanism? To answer this, we need not only to investigate what the feedback mechanism can do, but also need to understand, the more challenging and difficult issue, what the feedback mechanism cannot do. The feedback mechanism is defined as the class of all possible feedback laws (which are not restricted to a certain particular subclass), and the maximum capability of feedback is measured as the maximum size of uncertainties that can be dealt with by the feedback mechanism. In this lecture, we will mainly consider discrete-time (or sampled-data) nonlinear dynamical control systems with both structural and environmental uncertainties. We will present a series of “Critical Values” and “Impossibility Theorems” concerning the maximum capability of the feedback mechanism for several basic classes of uncertain nonlinear control systems, and will expand on their theoretical implications as well as their practical significances

Biography: Lei Guo received his B.S. degree in mathematics from Shandong University in 1982, and Ph.D. degree in control theory from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1987. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University (1987-1989). Since 1992, he has been a Professor of the Institute of Systems Science at CAS. He has been the President of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS (2003-2012), and is currently the Director of the National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, CAS.

Dr. Guo is a Fellow of IEEE, Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and Fellow of IFAC. He was a recipient of the National Natural Science Prizes of China, IFAC World Congress Young Author Prize, IFAC Outstanding Service Award, among others. He is currently an IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer (2012-2014).

He has served as a Council Member of IFAC, Member of IEEE Control Systems Award Committee, Associate Editor of SIAM J. Control and Optimization and Systems and Control Letters, General Co-Chair of the 48th IEEE-CDC, and Vice-President of both Chinese Mathematical Society and Chinese Association of Automation. Currently, he serves as the President of the China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM), Congress Director of the 8th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and on the editorial boards of a number of journals in mathematics, systems and control.

He has worked on problems in adaptive control, system identification, adaptive signal processing, and time series analysis. His current research interests include the capability of feedback, multi-agent systems, complex adaptive systems, and quantum control systems, among others.

Return to TOP

Large transport aircraft: Control challenges of the future

Professor Thomas Jones, Stellenbosch University and S-Plane Automation (Pty) Ltd
Tuesday August 26, 2014 at 18:15, Auditorium 1

Abstract: The evolution of large transport aircraft is driven by cost, passenger comfort and environmental impact, all within a highly competitive and regulated environment. As a result, creating the aircraft of the future presents various interesting control challenges. For the past 7 years, Stellenbosch University has partnered with Airbus and the National Aerospace Centre to investigate and solve some of these challenges. This lecture will focus on the evolution of projects within this partnership, serving Airbus centres of competence in France, Germany and the UK. Goals range from improving efficiency (e.g. applying shape memory alloy actuators) to improvements in safety (e.g. automatic return to flight envelope and conflict avoidance near airports) and general automation (e.g. automatic in-flight refuelling). The lecture will illustrate how detailed analysis and the application of advanced techniques may often lead us to relatively simple answers and quite general conclusions.

Biography: After receiving his BEng and MScEng degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University (SU) Prof Jones started his aerospace career at Aerotek (a division of the CSIR) and SU as a missile navigation and guidance system analyst. He relocated to the USA to join the CS Draper/MIT Technology Development Partnership Programme and was appointed as manager of the development programme whilst completing his PhD at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has more than 15 years of experience designing and building innovative practical solutions to aerospace control challenges on aircraft and missiles of various sizes, types and configurations. Prof Jones currently leads a team of 30 graduate students and academic staff specialising in aircraft and unmanned system automation at Stellenbosch University.

He has forged strong research partnerships with many local and international organisations, including Airbus, Armscor, Denel, the CSIR, the National Aerospace Centre and local and international universities. In 2008 he co-founded S-Plane Automation, a company successfully specialising in the development of high-end aircraft avionics and automation sub-systems serving the international market.

Prof. Jones is inter alia a member of IFAC’s Technical Committee on Aerospace, an Associate-Editor of Control Engineering Practice and a member of the Executive Committee of the South African Council for Automatic Control (an IFAC NMO).

Return to TOP

Cybergenetics: Feedback control of living cells at the gene level

Professor Mustafa Khammash, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)
Thursday August 28, 2014 at 08:30, Auditorium 1

Abstract: Norbert Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics presented a vision unifying the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Predating the discovery of the structure of DNA and the ensuing molecular biology revolution, applications in the life sciences at the time were limited. More than 60 years later, the confluence of modern genetic manipulation techniques, powerful measurement technologies, and advanced analysis methods is enabling a new area of research in which systems and control notions are used for regulating cellular processes at the gene level. We refer to this promising nascent field as Cybergenetics. This presentation describes novel analytical and experimental work that demonstrates how de novo control systems implemented with stochastic components can be interfaced with living cells and used to control their dynamic behavior. The feedback systems can either be realized on a computer (in-silico control) or through genetically encoded parts (in-vivo control). The two approaches will be compared and contrasted, and applications in biotechnology and therapeutics will be described.

Biography: Mustafa Khammash is the Professor of Control Theory and Systems Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). He received his PhD in control theory at Rice University, Houston in 1990. From 1990 till 2001, he was on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. In 2001 he joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he served as the Director of the Center for Control, Dynamical systems, and Computations (CCDC) from 2006 till he joined ETH in 2011.

Working at the interface of systems biology, synthetic biology, and control theory, Khammash develops novel computational methods for the modeling, simulation, analysis, and control of biological networks. In the area of systems biology, he utilizes these methods for reverse engineering biological complexity, with particular interest in understanding the role of dynamics, feedback, and randomness in endogenous biological circuits. In the area of synthetic biology, his research focuses on creating the mathematical foundation and necessary tools for the robust control of living cells.

Khammash is a Fellow of the IEEE, IFAC, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the Iowa State University Foundation Early Achievement in Research and Scholarship Award, the ISU College of Engineering Young Faculty Research Award, and the Ralph Budd Best Engineering PhD Thesis Award.

Return to TOP

Coordinated control of multi-agent systems: Lessons from collective animal behavior

Professor Naomi E. Leonard, Princeton University
Sponsored by The International Journal of Automation and Computing (IJAC)
Monday August 25, 2014 at 08:30, Auditorium 1

Abstract: Systematic design of distributed feedback for coordinated control of multi-agent systems has much to gain from the rigorous examination of the nonlinear dynamics of collective animal behavior. Animals in groups, from bird flocks to fish schools, employ distributed strategies with constraintson sensing, computation, and actuation. Yet, at the level of the group, they are known to manage a variety of challenging tasks quickly, robustly and adaptively in an uncertain and changing environment. I will review recent work on models and methods for studying the mechanisms of collective dynamics in animal groups. I will describe system theoretic tools used to prove how collective behavior depends on parameters that model the individual agents, the network interconnections, and the environment. And I will discuss how these developments lay foundations for systematic control design methodologies that endow engineered multi-agent systems with the remarkable features of animal groups.

Biography: Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an associated faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She is currently Director of Princeton’s Council on Science and Technology and an affiliated faculty member of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Program on Quantitative and Computational Biology. Her research and teaching are in control and dynamical systems with current interests in coordinated control of multi-agent systems, mobile sensor networks, collective animal behavior, and human decision dynamics. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the UCSB Mohammed Dahleh Award in 2005, and an Inaugural Distinguished ECE Alumni Award from the University of Maryland in 2012. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, ASME, SIAM, and IFAC. She received the B.S.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1991 and 1994. From 1985 to 1989, she worked as an engineer in the electric power industry.

Return to TOP

The impact of Model-Based Design on controls, today and in the future

Mr. Jack Little, MathWorks Inc.
Wednesday August 27, 2014 at 18:15, Auditorium 1

Abstract: From its roots in computer-aided control system design, Model-Based Design has dramatically expanded to change how today’s smarter systems – fueled by chips, software, and algorithms – are developed. Driven by the product-development needs of industry, Model-Based Design has grown to encompass system analysis and algorithm design, implementation through automatic code generation, plus verification and validation on both models and embedded code. Today, Model-Based Design is used in every industry that leverages control systems, including aerospace, automotive, industrial automation, medical devices, robotics, and energy. It is used not only for control systems but also for multidisciplinary systems that incorporate controls, computer vision, signal processing, communication, and other functionality. In this talk, Jack Little reviews the role of Model-Based Design in the proliferation of controlled and smart systems, as well as changes in controls education and research. Jack then looks forward to the future of Model-Based Design, and how it is evolving to help researchers and developers looking at the challenges of cyber-physical systems, distributed systems, and other systems of the future.

Biography: Jack Little is president and cofounder of MathWorks. He was a coauthor and principal architect of early versions of the company’s flagship MATLAB product as well as Signal Processing Toolbox and Control System Toolbox. Jack holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT (1978) and an M.S.E.E. degree from Stanford University (1980). A Fellow of the IEEE and Trustee of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, he writes and speaks about technical computing, Model-Based Design, entrepreneurship, and software industry issues.

Return to TOP

Bridging the gap between planning and control: A cascaded MPC approach

Dr. Joseph Z. Lu, Honeywell Process Solutions
Thursday August 27, 2014 at 18:15, Auditorium 1

Abstract: A new 1-to-n MPC cascade strategy is proposed for bridging the gap between planning and control and for improving operating profitability. Industrial facilities, such as oil refineries, LNG plants and alumina plants, are typically comprised of multiple processing units and have thousands of control measurements and PID loops in aggregate. From a plantwide perspective, control and planning are almost always coupled: Planning relies on control to establish the feasible region for optimization, while control relies on planning to run the plant at the most profitable operating point.

Ideally, control and plantwide optimization should be designed jointly. A primary unsolved issue in the joint-design approach is how to provide simultaneously decentralized controls at the unit level and centralized optimization at the plant level. Decentralized MPC solutions are more desirable because of their better operability and flexibility in dealing with unit upsets, equipment failures, and maintenance, whereas centralized plantwide optimization is more desirable because the bird’s eye view in the planning model distills out unessential or even obscuring details.

Currently, this complex problem is decomposed into several layers – with a plantwide planning solution layer at the top, an MPC solution layer at the unit level, and possibly one or two intermediate layers in between (scheduling and/or RTO layers, for example). A considerable drawback of this decomposition lies in a lack of guaranteed solution consistency across multiple layers. In practice the planning optimization layer is rarely, if at all, implemented as a part of the closed-loop control system. As a result, a significant amount of optimization benefits still remain unreachable, and a recent benefit study confirms that there is an estimated amount of 20-30 million US dollars of un-captured benefits per year for a mid-sized North America refinery.

The proposed 1-to-n MPC cascade strategfill the void of gate-to-gate (i.e., plantwide) optimization as part of an automatic control system. The master MPC uses an existing single-period planning model (or other suitable reduced models) as a seed model and performs the plantwide economic optimization inside its embedded optimizer. It cascades on top of multiple slave MPC controllers at the unit level, and the slave MPC controllers provide the master with the unit’s operating states and constraints. Therefore, the plantwide optimal solution from the master will always honor all the unit-level operating constraints in the slave MPCs. Jointly, the cascaded MPC provides simultaneously decentralized controls at the unit level and centralized gate-to-gate optimization at the plant level in a single, consistent control system.

Biography: Joseph Lu received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Washington in 1990. He joined Honeywell in 1990, held various research and development roles and currently is Senior Fellow and Chief Scientist of Advanced Solutions. His research interest has primarily been in the areas of advanced control, robust control and multi-unit or plantwide optimization for process industries.

Joseph is the recipient of the 2010 Control Engineering Practice Award from American Automatic Control Council and is a member of IEEE.

Return to TOP

Specification, verification and synthesis of networked control systems

Professor Richard Murray, California Institute of Technology
Friday August 29, 2014 at 08:30, Auditorium 1

Abstract: Design of modern control systems involves the analysis and synthesis of feedback controllers at multiple levels of abstraction, from fast feedback loops around actuators and subsystems, to higher level decision-making logic in supervisory controllers and autonomous systems. One of the major challenges in design of complex networked control systems -- such as those arising in aerospace, computing, robotics, critical infrastructure and manufacturing systems, to name a few -- is insuring that the combination of dynamical behavior and logical decision-making satisfy detailed safety and performance specifications. In many of these areas, verification and validation are now dominant drivers of schedule and cost, and the tools available for design of such systems are falling behind the needs of systems and control engineers, particularly in the area of systematic design of the mixed continuous and discrete control laws for networked systems.

This talk focuses on work over the last 10 years by a variety of groups interested in rigorous specification and systematic synthesis of decision-making logic for hybrid systems. This decision-making logic is responsible for selecting modes of operation for the underlying (continuous) control system, reacting to external events and failures in the system, and insuring that the overall control system is satisfying safety and performance specifications. Tools from computer science, such as model-checking and logic synthesis, provide new approaches to solving these problems. A major shift is the move from “design then verify” to “specify then synthesize” approaches to controller design that allow simultaneous synthesis of high-performance, robust control laws and correct-by-construction decision-making logic. This talk will provide an overview of the relevant theory and recent results in this area, as well as include examples of their application to autonomous vehicles and aircraft electrical power distribution systems.

Biography: Richard M. Murray received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray’s research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in autonomy and synthetic biology. Current projects include specification, verification and synthesis of networked control systems; analysis and design biomolecular feedback circuits; and novel architectures for control using slow computing.

Return to TOP

The evolving electrical grid: From slow and passive to fast and active

Dr. Ernst Scholtz, ABB Corporate Research
Tuesday August 26, 2014 at, 18:15, Auditorium 2

Abstract: The entire electrical energy supply chain is being transformed: Generation is transitioning to environmentally friendlier sources e.g. Wind and Solar; Global efforts are underway to modernize the power transport infrastructure by using more IT, communication and controllable grid hardware; Demand is becoming elastic with e.g. uptake of residential PV. In this talk an overview of such changes will be given before elaborating on a challenging power-transport control problem. A DC Supergrid to access and integrate remote renewables into the rest of the electrical energy supply chain has been proposed in the past, but technical hurdles have stood in the way of realizing such a grid. ABB and others have steadily been addressing these challenges and in this talk solutions of how to operate a HVDC grid in tandem with existing AC systems will be discussed, ultimately showing that by using more power electronics (e.g. HVDC) grids can be transformed into active systems with improved response.

Biography: Ernst Scholtz was born in South Africa where he received his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and his M.Eng in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pretoria, in 1997 and 1999 respectively. In 2004, he obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering. He was a Principal Scientist at ABB US Corporate Research, in Raleigh, NC from 2004 to 2008. In this capacity he focused on development of monitoring and control solutions for Electrical Power Transmission Systems and Equipment. In 2008, he joined EPIC Merchant Energy (now part of EDF Trading) in Houston, TX as a Senior Analyst focusing on system analysis of and financial trading in deregulated power markets. In 2009, Ernst rejoined ABB Corporate Research as Global Program Manager for Grid Automation where he manages a research portfolio focused on Power Grid Techno-economic Analysis, Automation and Control with projects being executed at Research Centers in USA, Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, India and China. He is also the CTO for ABB’s Industry Sector Initiative on Smart Grids. Ernst’s interests are in the areas of systems, control, and finance theory with a focus on applications in power systems, and industrial processes.

Return to TOP

Safety critical control systems: A manned and unmanned autonomous aircraft perspective

Dr. David Vos, Tebogo LLC
Tuesday August 26, 2014 at 08:30, Auditorium 1

Abstract: As the aviation community including companies, regulators, researchers etc., and society at large contemplates the integration of highly automated unmanned aircraft into the airspace currently utilized by manned aviation, several important topics arise. One key consideration is safety of the automation systems and subsystems both onboard the unmanned aircraft, onboard manned aircraft and on the ground. Consider the context added by recent high profile commercial aviation accidents such as the San Francisco Asiana Airlines accident in 2013 and the Atlantic Ocean Air France flight 447 accident in 2009. Both of these accidents involved manned aircraft with high levels of automation onboard. Many opinions, studies and reports delivered against this backdrop could be construed to imply that the means of improving safety lies in reducing levels of automation and autonomy in the various functions performed by computers, software, algorithms etc. and returning to more human-in-the-loop architectures. The unmanned systems community has blossomed in the past two decades in no small measure due to the proliferation and widespread availability of high performance, low cost and low power consumption computation, sensing, communication, imaging and other technologies. This has resulted in an unprecedented level of automation and autonomy capability being deployed on UAS systems ranging from very small to very large and covering a plethora of roles and missions. This presentation considers the current state and this very exciting future to highlight domains in which much technological development is needed. This include systems engineering, software development, redundancy management, control and estimation theory, requirements development and tracking, as well as concomitant design, development and testing techniques, tools and methodologies in order to leverage the enormous value brought by highly automated Safety Critical Systems. A fundamentally important attribute of these technologies is the need for enabling development and full scale deployment of Safety Critical Systems at a market-affordable cost and price. Such solutions will provide enormous technological and business opportunities to the Control Systems Community by enabling a vision of delivering Safety Critical Systems that far exceed the reliability of such systems today whilst being much more affordable on multiple facets. The market needs and opportunities expand far beyond aviation, to include all forms of transportation, medical devices and systems, power generation systems and more.

Biography: Dave Vos was born in Paarl, South Africa in 1961 and grew up in the Cape Town region He holds engineering degrees Hons. B.Ing (Aero) from the University of Stellenbosch (1983) and S.M. (1989) and Ph.D. (1992) from MIT’s Aero/Astro Department, Boston, USA. His graduate work at MIT demonstrated the world’s first autonomous unicycle robot. Dave was CEO, CTO and Founder of Athena Technologies, incorporated in 1998. Athena developed and produced navigation, guidance, flight and engine control systems for the Unmanned Aircraft market. Athena grew rapidly to become a market leader delivering autonomous navigation and control systems for a wide variety of unmanned aircraft programs worldwide and was acquired by Rockwell Collins in 2008. Vos was one of Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Winners in the Washington DC Region in 2007 and holds several patents in nonlinear control systems, failure detection systems, optimal power control systems and more. He recently served on the USA FAA Aviation Rulemaking Committee for Integration of Unmanned Aircraft into the National Airspace System as well as on the NASA Unmanned Systems Advisory Committee. Current areas of business and technology interest include Aerospace, Transportation and Renewable Energy.

Return to TOP

Bionic Learning Network – Inspired by nature

Dr. Heinrich Frontzek, Festo AG
Monday August 25, 2014 at 18:15, Auditorium 1

Abstract: This lecture will discuss the Bionic Learning Network in which Festo cooperates with renowned universities, institutes and companies to develop technical applications and industrial practice that are inspired by principles from nature. The lecture will showcase some of the experimental platforms that resulted from this program. More information is available from http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9617.htm

Biography: As Head of Corporate Communications for Festo AG, Dr. Heinrich Frontzek controls all corporate communication activities worldwide. He is responsible for the corporate reputation, design and brand management, develops communication strategies and acts as an advisor to the Management Board.

Dr. Frontzek has more than 15 years of experience in corporate communication of innovation, technology, education and knowledge in engineering industrial companies. He was founding president of the Cluster Initiative Mechatronics Baden-Württemberg and is member of communication networks of VDMA (German Engineering Federation) and of acatech ( German Academy of Science and Engineering). In his role he heads up the Festo Bionic Learning Network, awarded with the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany 2010 in the category Communication Design.

Return to TOP