Magnus Egerstedt on Interacting with Multi-Robot Networks

Wednesday May 22, 13:15 (1:15pm), Wigforssalen, Halmstad University

The last few years have seen significant progress in our understanding of how one should structure multi-robot systems. New control, coordination, and communication strategies have emerged and, in this talk, we summarize some of these developments. In particular, we will discuss how to go from local control rules to global behaviors in a systematic manner in order to achieve distributed geometric objectives, such as achieving and maintaining formations, area coverage, and swarming behaviors. We will also investigate how users can interact with networks of mobile robots in order to inject new information and objectives. The efficacy of these interactions depends directly on the interaction dynamics and the structure of the underlying information-exchange network. We will relate these network-level characteristics to controllability notions in order to produce effective human-swarm interaction strategies.

About Prof. Magnus Egerstedt

Magnus Egerstedt is the Schlumberger Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University. Dr. Egerstedt's research interests include hybrid and networked control, with applications in motion planning, control, and coordination of mobile robots. Magnus Egerstedt is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (GRITS Lab), a Fellow of the IEEE, and a received the ECE/GT Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, the Georgia Tech Teaching Efficiency Award, and the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Karl Iagnemma on Autonomy is overrated: Towards shared human-machine control of vehicles and other mechanical systems

Wednesday May 15, 10:15 (10:15am), Haldasalen, Halmstad University

Many important tasks such as vehicle navigation, unmanned system teleoperation, and robotic surgery require human operators to interact with a computer controlled mechanical system. Currently, there is intense research activity devoted toward complete automation of system operation. However, human operators will remain "in the loop" for the foreseeable future, due to various technical issues, legal issues, and social issues. The development of shared control methods for operator assistance, safeguarding, and augmentation are thus a necessary component of future intelligent systems. This talk will present an approach to shared human-machine control (i.e. “semi-autonomous control”) that is abstracted as a constraint planning problem. In this approach, constraints are defined to bound a safe operational region of the physical environment, input space, and state space. Methods for "threat assessment" are used to estimate the hazard level of a given scenario, and this threat estimate is used to partition control between the human operator and the control system. Simulated and experimental results are presented in the context of manned and unmanned (i.e. teleoperated) vehicle navigation, and demonstrate the framework’s ability to robustly ensure vehicle safety while sharing control with a human driver.

About Dr. Karl Iagnemma

Karl Iagnemma is a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Robotic Mobility Group. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He has performed postdoctoral research at MIT, and has been a visiting researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), and is currently a Guest Professor at Halmstad University. He is a current or past associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the Journal of Field Robotics. Dr. Iagnemma's primary research interests are in the areas of design, sensing, motion planning, and control of mobile robots in outdoor terrain, including modeling and analysis of robot-terrain interaction. He is author of the monograph Mobile Robots in Rough Terrain: Estimation, Planning and Control with Application to Planetary Rovers (Springer, 2004), and co-editor of a pair of widely read books on the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge unmanned vehicle races. He has recently led research programs for agencies including the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, the Army Research Office, DARPA, the NASA Mars Program Office, Nissan, Ford Motor Company, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, among others. He has authored or co-authored over 100 conference and journal papers on a wide range of robotic topics, and has consulted for various private companies and government agencies.

Radu Grosu on The Human Heart An Ultimate Cyber-Physical System

Wednesday April 24, 13:15 (1:15pm), Haldasalen, Halmstad University

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This talk discusses the opportunities and research challenges faced in the modeling, analysis and control of the human heart. Consisting of more than 4 billion communication nodes, interconnected through a very sophisticated communication structure, this ultimate cyber-physical system achieves with an astonishing reliability, the electric synchronization and the mechanical contraction of all of its nodes, in order to pump blood, during what is commonly known as a heart beat. However, even this cyber-physical system, engineered by billion years of evolution is fallible, and predicting its failure is a great challenge for our society.

About Prof. Radu Grosu

Radu Grosu is a Professor and Head of the Dependable-Systems Group at the Faculty of Informatics of the Vienna University of Technology, and a Research Professor at the Computer Science Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include modeling, analysis and control of cyber-physical and biological systems and his application focus includes green operating systems, mobile ad-hoc networks, automotive systems, the Mars rover, cardiac-cell networks and genetic regulatory networks. Grosu is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award, the State University of New York Research Foundation Promising Inventor Award, the ACM Service Award, and a member of the International Federation of Information Processing WG 2.2. Before receiving his appointment at the Vienna University of Technology, Grosu was an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he co- directed the Concurrent-Systems laboratory and co-founded the Systems-Biology laboratory. Grosu earned his Dr.rer.nat. in Computer Science from the Technical University of München, and was a Research Associate in the Computer Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.

Janos Sztipanovits on Model-based Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

Tuesday April 16, 13:15 (1:15pm), Wigforssalen, Halmstad University

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CPS design flows span physical and computational domains and incorporate software synthesis for cyber and manufacturability concerns for physical components. Heterogeneity is the norm as well as the main challenge: components and systems are modeled using multiple physical, logical, functional and non-functional modeling aspects. Traditional design flows use the separation of concern principle to decompose the overall design problem into manageable problem sizes. However, the fundamental goal of model-based design - to move toward a correct-by-construction design technology - requires modeling and analyzing cross-domain interactions among physical and cyber domains and demands understanding the effects of heterogeneous abstraction layers in the design flow. The talk will summarize progress and lessons learned during the development of a design tool chain for real-life applications in vehicle application domains.

About Prof. Janos Sztipanovits

Dr. Janos Sztipanovits is currently the E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Vanderbilt University and he also holds the Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor title in 2012/2013. He is founding director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS). His research areas are at the intersection of systems and computer science and engineering. His current research interest includes the foundation and applications of Model-Integrated Computing for the design of Cyber Physical Systems. His other research contributions include structurally adaptive systems, autonomous systems, design space exploration and systems-security co-design technology. He was founding chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Software (SIGBED). He served as program manager and acting deputy director of DARPA/ITO between 1999 and 2002 and he was member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board between 2006-2010. He is member of the Academic Executive Board of Cyber-Physical Systems Virtual Organization and he is member of the national steering group. Dr. Sztipanovits was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 and external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He won the National Prize in Hungary in 1985 and the Golden Ring of the Republic in 1982. He graduated (Summa Cum Laude) from the Technical University of Budapest in 1970 and received his doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1980.

John Kenney on A Linear Adaptive Control Approach to Congestion Management in Cooperative ITS

Monday April 15, 10:15am, Wigforssalen, Halmstad University

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Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication hold great promise for significantly reducing the human and financial costs of vehicle collisions. A common characteristic of this communication is the broadcast of a device’s core state information at regular intervals, e.g. via the Cooperative Awareness Message defined by ETSI, or the Basic Safety Message defined by SAE. Unless controlled, the aggregate of these broadcasts will congest the channel under dense traffic scenarios. This talk explores the problems and characteristics of this congestion, and presents a congestion control approach based on adapting safety message transmission rates. The LInear MEssage Rate Integrated Control (LIMERIC) algorithm uses linear, as opposed to binary, adaptive feedback to keep channel load at a level that achieves high throughput and acceptable MAC frame collision probability. LIMERIC has provable stability and fairness properties. The talk also presents extensions to LIMERIC that enable differentiated transmission opportunities based on vehicle characteristics (e.g. dynamics). Analytical and NS-2 simulation results are presented that illustrate the performance and key characteristics of LIMERIC.

About Dr. John Kenney

John Kenney leads a vehicular networking research team at Toyota InfoTechnology Center in Mountain View, California. Research interests include wireless protocols at the MAC and Physical layers, congestion control, security, and performance optimization. He represents Toyota in the CAMP VSC consortium and in international standards organizations including IEEE, SAE, and ETSI. He was General Co-Chair of the ACM VANET Workshop in 2011 and 2012. He holds a Bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s from Stanford University. He also was an adjunct professor at Notre Dame from 1990-2010. Prior to his work for Toyota his research interests included high speed Internet switches, QoS, and adaptive systems.

Karl H. Johansson on Event-based control and estimation

Tuesday March 12, 13:15 (1:15pm), Haldasalen, Halmstad University

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There is a growing deployment of wireless networks in industrial control systems. Lower installation costs and easier system reconfigurations for wireless devices can have a major influence on the future application of distributed control and monitoring. There is however a lack of theory for understanding if and how the allocation of communication resources should be integrated with the control application. In this talk, we will discuss how the access scheme for the wireless medium can influence the closed-loop performance of the networked control system. It will be argued that the underlying scheduling-control problem has a non-classical information structure. Appropriate models for medium access control protocols will be introduced. It will be shown how these protocols can be tuned for various wireless control applications. We will also see that by making event-triggered transmissions based on decisions taken locally at the sensor and actuator nodes, it is possible improve the design and to limit the use of the communication resources. The talk will be illustrated by several examples from ongoing projects with Swedish industry. The presentation is based on joint work with several collaborators.

About Prof. Karl H. Johansson

Karl H. Johansson is Director of the KTH ACCESS Linnaeus Centre and Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is a Wallenberg Scholar and has held a six-year Senior Researcher Position with the Swedish Research Council. He is Director of the Stockholm Strategic Research Area ICT The Next Generation. He received MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley (1998-2000) and California Institute of Technology (2006-2007). His research interests are in networked control systems, hybrid and embedded system, and applications in smart transportation, energy, and automation systems. He has been a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and the Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems. He has been on the Editorial Boards of several journals, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IET Control Theory and Applications. He has been Guest Editor for special issues, including the one on "Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks" of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 2011. He was the General Chair of the ACM/IEEE Cyber-Physical Systems Week 2010 in Stockholm and IPC Chair of many conferences. He has served on the Executive Committees of several European research projects in the area of networked embedded systems. In 2009, he received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems. In 2009, he was also awarded Wallenberg Scholar, as one of the first ten scholars from all sciences, by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. He was awarded an Individual Grant for the Advancement of Research Leaders from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research in 2005. He received the triennial Young Author Prize from IFAC in 1996 and the Peccei Award from the International Institute of System Analysis, Austria, in 1993. He received Young Researcher Awards from Scania in 1996 and from Ericsson in 1998 and 1999. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Marcia O’Malley on Mechatronic Systems for the Repair and Training of Human Sensorimotor Control

Tuesday February 12, 13:15 (1:15pm), Haldasalen, Halmstad University

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The mission of the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces (MAHI) Lab at Rice University is to design, manufacture, and test mechatronic or robotic systems to model, rehabilitate, enhance, or augment the human sensorimotor control system. We are broadly focused on developments in machine design, control, and experimental methods in haptics research. Specifically, we employ a systems engineering approach, exploring the effects of force feedback on human performance in man-machine interactions with virtual and remote environments. In this talk, I will discuss several research thrusts in the lab. First, I will discuss work in robotic rehabilitation of the upper extremity following stroke and incomplete spinal cord injury. We have developed a range of techniques for ensuring active engagement of the participant in therapeutic interventions with robotic devices. Objective measures of motor impairment can provide frequent feedback to the participant regarding their performance during therapy. Control architectures can require initiation or sustained input from the user in order to generate desired movements. Further, controllers can be designed to adapt to the user’s changing capabilities, which may be dependent on position or direction of movement. Results from a variety of ongoing clinical evaluations will be discussed in relation to these topics. Second, I will discuss our work in the area of haptic guidance, or shared control between a robot and a human user. I will talk about our experiences in determining appropriate guidance algorithms and architectures based on task analysis and determination of successful human motor control strategies. I'll discuss the various types of guidance we have analyzed, and our outcomes for a number of tasks and architectures. Finally, I will discuss our work in sensory feedback for smart prosthetics, and the role of tactile and kinesthetic feedback for enhancing performance in positioning and manual control tasks. These research efforts embody the collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of my group’s research in biorobotics, haptics, neural engineering, and robotic rehabilitation.

About Dr. Marcia O’Malley

Marcia O’Malley received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. In 2001 she joined the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Rice University, where she is currently an Associate Professor and directs the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab. She holds a joint appointment in Computer Science at Rice, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at both Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. Additionally, she is the Director of Rehabilitation Engineering at TIRR-Memorial Hermann Hospital, and is a co-founder of Houston Medical Robotics, Inc. At Rice, her research addresses issues that arise when humans physically interact with robotic systems, with a focus on training and rehabilitation in virtual environments. In 2008, she received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice University. O’Malley is a 2004 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2005. She received the Best Paper Award at the 2011 IEEE World Haptics Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the former chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics and was on the founding editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. She currently serves on the editorial board of the ASME/IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics.