News
His thesis defended in late 2020 made it in top 10 in the category Industry 4.0 of Cena Wernera von Siemense 2021. Congratulations.
The defense was on January 27, 2022, at the Department of measurement. The thesis was on Design and implementation of an iterative learning control system for a dynamic plotter. The commitee graded Marek's thesis (and its presentation) using the A grade. Congratulations, Marek!
Zdeněk Hurák gives a detailed description of his experience with flipped learning gained over several years of practising this approach to teaching (and learning) in his course): https://vesmir.cz/cz/casopis/archiv-casopisu/2021/cislo-9/prevracena-vyu.... In Czech only.
Congratulations to our member Daniel Wagner for successfully defending his doctoral thesis on "Measures and LMIs for V&V [validation and verification] of Adaptive Control" on March 25, 2021.
Congratulations to our (now former) team member Štefan Knotek for successfully defending his doctoral thesis on February 9, 2021. The topic (and title) of the thesis was "Consensus and Synchronization in Distributed Estimation and Adaptive Control". Štefan was (co-)advised by Kristian Hengster-Movric and Michael Sebek. The thesis can be downloaded here.
We are particularly proud that we had three distringuished international reviewers:
The time was ripe on December 17, 2020, for one of our doctoral students Tomáš Michálek to defend his doctoral thesis entitled "Micromanipulation Using Dielectrophoresis: Modeling and Real-Time Optimization-Based Control".
The dissertation can be dowloaded at https://support.dce.felk.cvut.cz/mediawiki/images/0/09/Diz_2020_michalek_tomas.pdf.
However difficult the spring/summer semester 2020 was, all the final-year student members of AA4CC team have successfuly graduated. Congratulations to
Bc. Dominik Hodan, who worked on Reinforcement learning for manipulation of collections of objects using physical force fields,
Friday, December 6, 2019, International Public Airport Mnichovo Hradiště: the team from Faculty of Electrical Engineering Czech Technical University lead by professor Zdeněk Hurák conducted a unique experiment with commercial cars equipped with adaptive cruise control (ACC). Owners of such cars have been found through a public call and they participated in the experiment at their own expenses and risks, hence an excellent instance of citizen science.
On the first days of September, Jiří Zemánek started his postdoc at MIT. Sponsored by the prestigious Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship, Jiří joined Prof. Neil Gershenfeld in his Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Among other activities, Jiří is learning how to help other people learn... how to make (almost) anything...
Several student members of our group successfully defended their final theses and earned their Ing. and Bc. degrees in June 2019. In particular:
Master students
Krištof Pučejdl (supervised by Jiří Zemánek), and Loi Do, Vít Obrusník, Adam Polák, and Šimon Wernisch (supervised by Zdeněk Hurák).
Tomáš Michálek and Zdeněk Hurák participated at the 4th International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS) that was held July 1-5, 2019, in Helsinki, Finland. Tomáš gave a talk entitled "Feedback controlled dielectrophoresis - high-accuracy translation and rotation at micro and meso scales".
Our paper T. Michálek, A. Bolopion, Z. Hurák, and M. Gauthier, “Control-oriented model of dielectrophoresis and electrorotation for arbitrarily shaped objects,” Phys. Rev. E, vol. 99, no. 5, p. 053307, May 2019, on modeling dielectrophoresis and electrorotation of nonsymmetric objects published in Physical Review E journal https://journals.aps.org/pre.
The prize was awarded during the official meeting of Scientific Council on April 10, 2019.
We have just learnt that Jiří was awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship for the academic year 2019/2020, within which he is going to join Prof. Neil Gershenfeld in his Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. A well-deserved dream come true for Jiří. Congratulations!
Jiří, who likes to decorate Easter Eggs in an engineering way including EggBot drawn stroboscopic patterns (Eggstatic) or a laser created temporal patterns in photochromic paint (Eggstatic 2), decided to move from eggs to balls this year. With great help from his colleagues Martin, Krištof, and Filip they took Christmas ornaments to the next level and taught them to dance!
![Image](/sites/default/files/images/screenshot-msd-video.png "Screenshot of a video-lecture from the course on "Modeling and simulation of dynamical systems"")
The fact that some of our courses within Cybernetics and robotics program, namely Modeling and simulation of dynamical systems (MSD, taught in Czech) and Optimal and robust control (ORR, taught in English), are being transformed into a flipped learning format has recently attracted some attention of journalists.
Two members of the group - grad students Loi Do and Vít Obrusník - participated at OMNeT++ Community Summit 2018 at University of Pisa, Italy, in Septemer 5-7. In particular, they participated at OMNeT++ Hackaton. The goal for this participation was to accelerate learning of the modeling of communication protocols used in vehicular networking, namely IEEE 802.11p protocol. The hackaton offered an opportunity to discuss the ideas directly with OMNeT++.
The day has come at last when Jiří Zemánek defended his doctoral thesis on distributed manipulation in front of international reviewers, local committe and a wide audience and earned his Ph.D. degree. Congratulations!
![Image](/sites/default/files/images/388-0713.jpg "Zdeněk Hurák congratulated by the Dean for the "Teacher of the year 2017/18" award")
for the fall semester in the academic year 2017/2018 by the Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU in Prague. The award was given during the graduation ceremony in Betlémská kaple in August 30, 2018.
A paper entitled "Green's function-based control-oriented modeling of electric field for dielectrophoresis" and authored by Martin Gurtner, Kristian Hengster-Movric and Zdeněk Hurák has been published in Journal of Applied Physics. The figures from the paper have even been used on the cover of the journal.
In June, several undegraduate and graduate (master) students collaborating with our group have successfuly finished their studies. Namely, the successful undegraduate students supervised either by Zdeněk Hurák or Jiří Zemánek were
- David Kopecký
- Jaroslav Klapálek
- Adam Polák
- Lukáš Černý
- Michal Staněk
- Šimon Wernisch
and the successful graduate (master) students were
- Filip Richter
- Štěpán Riss
- Martin Lád
Congratulations to all of them!
A great success of our group at IFAC 2017 World Congress in Toulouse, France! The paper entitled "Time-Optimal Control for Bilinear Nonnegative-In-Control Systems: Application to Magnetic Manipulation" by Jiří Zemánek, Sergej Čelikovský a Zdeněk Hurák was awarded the EEA Demonstrator Paper Prize. This special demonstrator prize is funded by Club EEA (French association of professors and researchers in electrical and information sciences).
A new paper by Tomáš Michálek and Jiří Zemánek on "Dipole and multipole models of dielectrophoresis for a non-negligible particle size—simulations and experiments" has been accepted for publishing in Electrophoresis journal. It is already available online at https://doi.org/10.1002/elps.201600466.
Of the total number of four Dean's Prizes given this year, two were given to our former doctoral students - Dan Martinec (supervised by Michael Sebek) and Milan Anderle (supervised by Sergej Celikovsky). Congratulations!
Jiří is actively participating at the first International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM) taking place on November 13th-16th, 2016 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. This is in alignment with Jiří's desire to buld a makerspace at CVUT in Prague.
Last year we did an Easter video with an EggBot drawing various mathematically generated patterns. They were inspired by equations describing Spirograph and harmonograph. The video was quite popular so we decided to take it a bit further this year. The patterns are now calculated in such a way that when rotated under a stroboscopic light of suitable frequency or when recorded by a camera, they start to animate. It is kind of zoetrope--- early device for animation.
Ivo Herman succeeded in getting his paper "Transients of platoons with asymmetric and different Laplacians" published in System and Control Letters together with Peter Veerman from Portland State University. This is one of the first papers which use different Laplacian for coupling in each state. It is very difficult to analyze such systems. Therefore, they used a similarity of path and circular graphs.
Last year we have built an interactive Christmas tree for the entrance hall of Czech Technical University in Prague at Karlovo namesti, this year we were asked by journalists from a technological on-line magazine Technet to put our tree on board of the service tram, so that even wider audience would enjoy it. This tram lubricates the rails all around Prague to minimize noise and is equipped with a camera streaming live video on the Internet.
We have published fairly detailed guidelines for undergraduate students who want to do a project with us, be it a final-year undergraduate project/thesis or even an informal project collaboration in the second or third year.