News
Although officially published only in October, it is already available online, and therefore let's announce it proudly here: a paper by Loi Do (and Milan Korda and Zdeněk Hurák) has been published by the prestigious Control Engineering Practice. The paper demonstrates the use of Koopman Model Predictive Control (KMPC) for an experimental setup consisting of an array of pendulums and demonstrating the physical phenomenon modelled by Frenkel-Kontorova model.
It was out actually a few months ago (in Februrary) but let's proudly announce here even with this announcement delay: The key result of Martin Gurtner's thesis on distributed manipulation was published in the prestigious International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR):
Three student members of our group who successfully passe their final state exam and defended their theses on June 27, 2023. Namely
- Vít Fanta: Energy-efficient train control (supervised by Zdeněk Hurák)
- Dominik Fisher: Control system for morphing lattice-based structures (supervised by Jiří Zemánek)
Our nine undergraduate students (supervised by Zdeněk Hurák and Jiří Zemánek) successfully defended their final projects and theses. Namely
- Radek Chládek: Road grade estimation by onboard multisensor fusion [CZ] (supervised by Zdeněk Hurák)
- Jakub Kašpar: Algorithms for onboard estimation of vehicle motion states by multisensor fusion [CZ] (supervised by Zdeněk Hurák)
Ph.D. thesis defended by our (now ex) doctoral student Tomáš Michálek in late 2020 was awarded Werner von Siemense Prize 2022 for best thesis in on Industry 4.0 (awarded by Siemens Czech Republic).
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.