IEEE ICMA 2006 Tutorial Workshops

June 25, 2006

Huayang Hotel Conference Room

    The purpose of this tutorial workshop is to introduce the fractional calculus and its applications in controller designs. Fractional order calculus, or integration and differentiation of an arbitrary order or fractional order, is a new tools that extends the descriptive power of the conventional calculus. The tools of fractional calculus support mathematical models that in many cases more accurately describe the dynamic response of actual systems in electrical, mechanical, and automatic control applications etc. The theoretical and practical interest of these fractional order operators is nowadays well established, and its applicability to science and engineering can be considered as emerging new topics. The need to digitally compute the fractional order derivative and integral arises frequently in many fields especially in automatic control and digital signal processing. Fractional order proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are based on the fractional order calculus where the derivative or integral can be of a non-integer order. Due to the extra tuning knobs, it is expected that better control performance can be achieved if the fractional order PID controller is used. Fractional calculus has much to offer science and engineering by providing not only new mathematical tools, but more importantly, its application suggests new insights into the system dynamics as well as controls.

    The increasing power of computational resources makes possible the development of autonomous control systems that are capable of dealing with the complex task of path planning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Autonomous vehicles have applications in military operations, search and rescue, environment monitoring, commercial cleaning, material handling, and homeland security. While single vehicles performing solo missions will yield some benefits, greater benefits will come from the cooperation of teams of vehicles. One motivation for multiple autonomous vehicles is to achieve the same gains for mechanically controlled systems as has been gained in distributed computation. Rather than having a single monolithic (and therefore expensive and complicated) machine do everything, the hope is that many inexpensive, simple machines, can achieve the same or enhanced functionality, through coordination. There are numerous applications for cooperative control of multiple autonomous vehicles including space-based interferometry, future autonomous combat systems, autonomous household appliances, enhanced surveillance systems, hazardous material handling systems, and active reconfigurable sensing systems.

    The purpose of this workshop is overview the state of the art research in cooperative control of multiple autonomous vehicles. The presenters have been actively involved in this area over the past several years. Throughout the workshop the presenters will demonstrate both theoretical and experimental results in cooperative control. In particular, formation and non-formation type cooperative control problems will be introduced. Distributed consensus algorithms and their applications in multi-vehicle coordination will be presented. Recent research in autonomy and cooperation for small unmanned air vehicles will be presented. The approaches for decentralized adaptive scheduling and data exfiltration from unattended ground sensors will be introduced. An overview of a mobile actuator sensor network experimental platform will be given.

    The purpose of this workshop is to present a unified exposition of recent advances in ILC analysis and design, providing an integrated view of the presenters乫 collaborative research on theoretical and experimental aspects of ILC research, two streams that have developed over several years into a systematic methodology. At the 2000 CDC in Sydney a tutorial introduction to ILC was given that concentrated on the fundamentals of ILC. The present workshop is aimed at a more advanced and systematic focus on the algebraic approach to ILC analysis and on norm-optimal design of ILC algorithms that has developed since the previous tutorial. Throughout the workshop the underlying theme will be on ILC as a mature design methodology with both significant demonstration of, and further potential for, actual implementations with clearly visible returns in terms of improved performance.

    This tutorial is the first presented by the authors of Smart MEMS and Sensor Systems (2006, Imperial College Press). The aim of the tutorial is to present the directions of research, development and technological evolution for Electro Mechanical Microsystems, and in particular microsensors. The development of MEMS devices has generally followed a bottom up methodology, reaching now a stage where the capabilities of the devices could be used much more effectively in systems designed from the top down to include them. A holistic view of the requirements of MEMS based systems and the capabilities of the microdevices must be taken if such systems are to deliver the promise that was expected. This tutorial provides the integrative perspective required for workers in all areas of the field, to enable them to appreciate the system level design issues leading to breakthrough sensing applications.

    This tutorial is the second presented by the authors of Smart MEMS and Sensor Systems (2006, Imperial College Press). This tutorial concentrates on the problems posed in the design of large scale wireless sensor networks. The literature in the field is rich, containing solutions to many problems. Only some of these problems will be faced in practice by implementers of WSN, and not all of the theoretical solutions work. Practical experience of WSN design is required to separate out the real problems and real solutions. The perspective here is strictly practical, and top-down, so as to provide helpful guidance for those embarking on WSN design.