Mr. F. L. Lewis who is currently a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors, Moncrief-O’Donnell Endowed Chair and Head, Advanced Controls & Sensors Group UTA Research Institute (UTARI), The University of Texas at Arlington, was invited to give a distinguished lecture. Co-robotics involves humans and robots working together safely in the same shared space as a team. This motivates physical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems that adapt to different humans and have guaranteed robustness and stability properties. In this talk, three adaptive HRI control systems are proposed that assist the human operator to perform a given task with minimum human workload demands and improved overall human-robot system performance. (Read more)
Professor Wei LIN who is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, was invited to give a distinguished lecture. GALES and uniform observability imply semi-global asymptotic stabilizability by sampled-data output feedback, which is indeed a sampled-data version of the “separation principle” for nonlinear systems. Lyapunov argument that makes the estimation of domains of attraction and semiglobal asymptotic analysis intuitive and simple, without involving intricate Lyapunov functions and the corresponding level sets. Examples and results on SGAS by sampled-data feedback for representative classes of nonlinear systems are also given as illustrations. (Read more)
Professor Richard H. Middleton who is currently an emeritus professor at the University of Newcastle, was invited to give a distinguished lecture. There has been much work in relation to multi agent systems over many years. Yet some fundamental issues seem very difficult to both formulate clearly, and solve. In this talk I will look at some examples and analysis for which I am not aware of a clean solution. This will start with questions such as: (i) does asymmetry “help” in improving networked control? (ii) can we extend frequency domain sensitivity trade-offs work from strings to networks? (iii) are there simple, rigorous bounds on algebraic connectivity of families of graphs formed recursively? (Read more)
Professor Yutaka Yamamoto who is currently a Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University, was invited to give a lecture on “A New Paradigm for Signals and Control”. Modern technology has induced the strong trend of replacing conventional analog processing techniques by digital counterparts. In this talk, we will clarify that this conclusion hinges upon a presumptuous hypothesis on the nature of signals, and can be replaced by another hypothesis on a physical model of the class of signals we are dealing with. Based on such a signal model, we can develop a new technique of obtaining high frequency components beyond the Nyquist frequency. We will base this new theory on the H-infinity sampled-data control theory, and exhibit various striking applications in signal processing, and also the control of signals beyond the Nyquist frequency. (Read more)
Professor CHEN Benmei who is currently a Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an IEEE Fellow and Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore, was invited to give a lecture aiming to present the recent development of some unconventional unmanned systems and a fully autonomous infrastructure inspection and information management system with advanced AI and UAS technologies. The autonomous inspection system includes sophisticated unmanned hardware platforms and software systems for automatic flight control, task and motion planning, and AI techniques for RGB image and infrared data processing for defect detections. (Read more)
Professor LIU Yun-hui who is currently Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Director of the CUHK T Stone Robotics Institute, and the Director/CEO of Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics funded by the InnoHK clusters of the HKSAR government was invited to present a talk regarding technical challenges in eye-hand coordination, and demonstrates our work on visual servoing of robot arms and mobile robots, vision-based robot grasping, robotic manipulation of soft objects, vision-guided navigation of mobile robots, etc. Applications of the vision-guided robotics technology in manufacturing, logistics and surgery were also be introduced. (Read more)
Batch process is the preferred choice for the manufacturing of specialty chemicals or other high value-added products. This talk introduced thermoplastic injection molding, a process converting plastic granules into various molded parts, as an illustrating process to highlight the batch process nature. The second part was the progresses of these automation methodology developments by exploring or addressing the batch nature. The lecturer Professor GAO Furong is a Chair Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), he also serves HKUST as the Founding Director, Center for Polymer Processing and Systems (CPPS) since 2007 and international molding communities as the President, Society of Advanced Molding Technology (SAMT) since 2017. (Read more)
