From Robots Design to Navigation and Scene Understanding
Roland Siegwart, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Cooperative MPC, Applications to Renewable Energy Systems
Eduardo F. Camacho, University of Seville, Spain
On the Regulation of Rivers
Jean-Michel Coron, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France
From Robots Design to Navigation and Scene Understanding
Roland Siegwart
ETH Zurich
Switzerland
http://www.asl.ethz.ch/people/rolandsi
Brief Bio
Roland Siegwart (born in 1959) is professor for autonomous mobile robots at ETH Zurich, founding co-director of the Wyss Zurich and member of the board of directors of multiple high tech companies. He studied mechanical engineering at ETH, brought up a spin-off company, spent ten years as professor at EPFL Lausanne (1996 – 2006), was vice president of ETH Zurich (2010 -2014) and held visiting positions at Stanford University and NASA Ames.He is and was the coordinator of multiple European projects and co-founder of half a dozen spin-off companies. He is IEEE Fellow and recipient of the IEEE RAS Pioneer award and the IEEE RAS Inaba Technical Award. He is on the editorial board of multiple journals in robotics and was a general chair of several conferences in robotics including IROS 2002, AIM 2007, FSR 2007, ISRR 2009, FSR 2017 and CoRL 2018. His interests are in the design and navigation of wheeled, walking and flying robots operating in complex and highly dynamical environments. Hi is a strong promotor of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Abstract
While robots are already doing a wonderful job as factory workhorses, they are now gradually appearing in our daily environments and offering their services as autonomous cars, delivery drones, helpers in search and rescue and much more.
This talk will focus on the design and autonomous navigation of flying robots as well as 3D environment modeling and semantic understanding of the world. Innovative designs and control of flying systems, from solar airplanes for continuous flights to omni-directional multi-copters able to fly in contact with their environment, are presented. Recent results of visual and laser based navigation (perception, localization, mapping, planning) in GPS denied environments, including incremental 3D object modeling for semantic scene understanding, are showcased and discussed.
Cooperative MPC, Applications to Renewable Energy Systems
Eduardo F. Camacho
University of Seville
Spain
Brief Bio
Eduardo F. Camacho received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Seville, Seville, Spain. He is now a Full Professor with the Department of System and Automation Engineering, University of Seville. He is author of Model Predictive Control in the Process Industry (1995), Advanced Control of Solar Plants (1997), Model Predictive Control (1999), (Springer, 2004, 2nd edition), Control e Instrumentacion de Procesos Quimicos (Ed. Sintesis), Control of Deadtime Processes (Springer, 2007) and Control of Solar Systems (Springer, 2011, translated and printed in China Machine Press2014) He has served on various IFAC technical committees and chaired the IFAC publication Committee from 2002-2005. He was the president of the European Control Association (2005-2007) and chaired the IEEE/CSS International Affairs Committee (2003-2006), Chair of the IFAC Policy Committee and a member of the IEEE/CSS Board of Governors and he is currently a member of the IFAC Council. He has acted as evaluator of projects at national and European level and was appointed Manager of the Advanced Production Technology Program of the Spanish National R&D Program (1996-2000). He was one of the Spanish representatives on the Program Committee of the Growth Research program and expert for the Program Committee of the NMP researchpriority of the European Union. He has carried out reviews and editorial work for various technical journals and many conferences. He has been one of the Editors of the IFAC Journal, Control Engineering Practice, Editor-at-Large of the European Journal of Control and Subject Editor of Optimal Control:Methods and Applications. Dr. Camacho is an IEEE and FAC Fellow. He was Publication Chair for the IFAC World Congress 2002, General Chair of the joint 44th IEEE CDC-ECC 2005, and co-General Chair of the joint 50th IEEE CDC-ECC 2011. He has recently been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for a project consisting in the integrating solar radiation sensors mounted in drones for controlling solar plants.
Abstract
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has developed considerably in the last decades both in industry and in academia. This success is due to the fact that Model Predictive Control is perhaps the most general way of posing the control problem in the time domain. Although the technique originated in industry, the academic research community has contributed, during the last two decades, important results, especially in the stability domain, where stability and robustness conditions for MPC have been well established. Although MPC was first applied in a centralized manner with linear models, researchers are extending the technique to more challenging situations such as the application of MP to nonlinear systems and in a distributed control framework. Results coming from game theory are being incorporated in MPC to handle the control of system compose of different agent that may work in cooperative or competing frameworks.
The talk addresses some of these issues, it shows how concepts arising from game theory can be incorporated in an MPC framework and the advantages that can be gained by using MPC in this context. The talk is illustrated with aplications of MPC to solar power plants and fleets of electric cars.
On the Regulation of Rivers
Jean-Michel Coron
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
France
Brief Bio
Jean-Michel Coron studied at École polytechnique. He first worked in the field of non-linear functional analysis. Since the beginning of the nineties, he studied the control theory of finite dimensional control systems and of partial differential equations, which includes both controllability and stabilization issues. His results put strong emphasis on nonlinear phenomena, and part of them found real life applications to control channels.
Jean-Michel Coron was awarded numerous prizes, like the Fermat prize in 1993, the Dargelos prize in 2002, the ICIAM Maxwell Prize in 2015 and the W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize (SIAM) in 2017.
He was invited as a semi/plenary speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians, at the 2015 International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics and at the IFAC 2017 World Congress. He is now a Professor at Sorbonne Université (Paris 6) and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project he has more than 110 descendants.
Abstract
Hyperbolic systems in one space dimension appear in various real life applications (navigable rivers and irrigation channels, heat exchangers, plug flow chemical reactors, gas pipe lines, chromatography,...). This talk will focus the stabilization issue of these systems. Stabilizing feedback laws will be constructed. This includes explicit feedback laws which have been implemented for the regulation of the rivers La Sambre and La Meuse. The talk will also deal with the more complicate case where there are source terms as well as with the integral action.