Seminar by Prof. J Karl Hedrick
The California Alumni Association of Michigan presents a seminar on "Control of Mobile Sensor Networks" by Professor J. Karl Hedrick from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley. If you plan to attend, please RSVP to sjmoura at umich.edu.
DATE: Tuesday October 21, 2008
TIME: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
LOCATION: 2233 GG Brown, 2350 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
RSVP: Send Scott an e-mail at sjmoura at umich.edu by Sunday October 19, 2008
Refreshments will be served!
Professor J. Karl Hedrick
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Control of Mobile Sensor Networks
Abstract:
Interest in using autonomous mobile vehicles, such as unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), to form mobile sensor networks is gaining momentum in many different military and civilian sectors. This seminar will present recent work at UC Berkeley on several aspects of this problem.
The first area is defining a distributed system architecture that includes a mission definition language, middleware to access available assets and monitor the mission status and finally a distributed control structure that permits task allocation, path planning and aircraft control.
The second area is cooperative target search and localization using an information theoretic approach. The goal here is to maximize the probability of target detection while simultaneously reducing the error in its localization.
Results from recent flight tests will be shown to illustrate the practicality of our approach.
Biography:
B.S. Engineering Mechanics, University of Michigan, 1966
M.S. Aeronautical and Astronautical. Eng., Stanford University, 1970
Ph.D. Aeronautical and Astronautical. Eng., Stanford University, 1971
Professor Hedrick is the James Marshall Wells Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Automatic Control Theory. His research focuses on the application of advanced control theory to a wide variety of vehicle dynamic systems including automotive, aircraft and ocean vehicles. He is currently the Director of Berkeley’s Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory as well as the PI of the Office of Naval Research center at Berkeley, the Center for the Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles.
He served as the Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley from 1999-2004.
He served as the Director of the University of California PATH Research Center, a multi-disciplinary research program located at the Richmond Field Station from 1997-2003. PATH conducts research in a variety of advanced transportation areas including advanced vehicle control systems, advanced traffic management and information systems and technology leading to an automated highway system.
Before coming to Berkeley he was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT from 1974-1988, where he served as Director of the Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory.
His research has concentrated on the development of nonlinear control theory and on its application to a broad variety of transportation systems including automated highway systems, power train control, embedded software design, formation flight of autonomous vehicles, and active suspension systems. The active suspension laboratory at UC Berkeley is the only full scale, half car test facility in the US.
He has offered short courses on active and semi-active suspensions, nonlinear control theory, automated highway systems, and unmanned vehicle systems in the US and in Europe.
He has served on many national committees including the Transportation Research Board, the American National Standards Institute, ISO (International Standards Organization) and the NCHRP (National Cooperative Highway Research Program).
He is currently chairman of the International Association of Vehicle System Dynamics (IAVSD) 20th Symposium to be held in August of 2007 and was the editor of the Vehicle Systems Dynamics Journal. He is a Fellow of ASME where he has served as Chairman of the Dynamic Systems and Controls Division and as Chairman of the Honors Committee. He is also a member of SAE and AIAA.
He has been awarded a number of honors including, ASME, Dynamic Systems and Control Division’s Outstanding Investigator Award, 2000, ASME, DSM&C Journal’s Best Paper Award (1983&2001), IEEE Transactions on Control Systems and Technology’s Outstanding Paper Award (1998), and the American Automatic Control Council’s O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award (2003). He was awarded ASME’s 2006 Rufus Oldenburger Medal which recognizes significant contributions and outstanding achievements in the field of automatic control.
