News
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.
Our student Jan Filip won the second prize in "ABB University Award" (http://www.abb.cz/cawp/seitp202/67b19426a3ab3b8fc1257e6e004f2d33.aspx) with his bachelor thesis „Extension of the Control System for Magnetic Manipulator with a Non-Flat Surface“ which he did in our group under supervision of Jiri Zemanek. Besides, Jan also won the award from Facebook fans.
Seems like a successful year so far! One paper in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, two papers in Electrophoresis, one paper in Automatica and one in Journal of Franklin Institute. A few more papers are in a review process and yet some more about to be submitted... This is a true harvest of the hard work in the previous years. Hurrah!
On Monday, December 8, Jiří was one of a few people from robotics and automation fields who were interviewed about recent updates in robotics by "Český rozhlas Plus" radio station within their "Leonardo Magazine". Jiří gave a short explanation of humanoid robotics DARPA Challenge. Starting at about 5:35 at http://prehravac.rozhlas.cz/audio/3268731. In Czech language.
Videoclip created by Jiří Zemánek about the platform for magnetic manipulation made it among the finalists of the 2014 IEEE Control Systems Society Video Contest. The videoclip was shown during CSS Video Clip Contest Awards ceremony that was held during the 2014 IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control (MSC 2014) in Antibes, France.
The course is mainly targetted at PhD students but research-oriented MSc students should also consider attending. The course has the code XP35CCM and the details of the course are at http://www.fel.cvut.cz/education/rozvrhy-ng.B141/public/cz/predmety/31/65/p3165206.html. Students from other departments and faculties and even universities are warmly welcome.
Jiří submitted his video on his MagMan platform, which previously won the Matlab and Simulink Student Design Challenge, to the video contest organized by the IEEE Control Systems Community. The website for the contest is at http://www.ieeecss.org/video-contest. The submitted videos are listed at http://www.ieeecss.org/video-contest/submissions. Keep your fingers crossed for Jiří.
The 19th IFAC World Congress was held on August 24-29, 2014, in Cape Town, South Africa. Ivo presented two papers. First, the paper entitled "Zeros of transfer functions in networked control with higher-order dynamics" coauthored with Dan Martinec and Michael Šebek. Second, the paper entitled "Two-sided wave-absorbing control of a heterogenous vehicular platoon", which was actually authored by Dan Martinec (Ivo being the second author, Michael Sebek the third one).
In particular, three research labs were visited:
* Control of Miniaturized Systems group at University of Maryland chaired by Prof. Benjamin Shapiro
* Dynamical Systems and Nonlinear Control Theory group at UC Santa Barbara chaired by Prof. Igor Mezic
* MicroScale Bioseparations Laboratory at Rochester Institute of Technology chaired by Prof. Blanca H. Lapizco Encinas
The conference was held on July 8-11, 2014 in Besançon, France. The title of the paper was "Dielectrophoretic Actuation Strategy for Micromanipulation Along Complex Trajectories" and the paper was coauthored by Jakub Drs and Zdeněk Hurák. The paper describes the team's solution to the Mobile Microrobotics Challenge, in particular the 2012 run, when the team ranked fourth.
The 13th European Control Conference was held on June 25-27 in Strasbourgh, France. The title of the paper was "Refinement of a bidirectional platooning controller by wave absorption at the leader". The paper was coauthored by Ivo Herman, Zdeněk Hurák and Michael Šebek. The paper can be downloaded at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ECC.2014.6862263.
After presenting his work at 2014 American Control Conference in June 2014, Ivo dropped in at University of California Santa Barbara to give a talk withing the regular seminar series of their Center for Control, Dynamical-Systems and Computation (CCDC). The title of the talk was "Transfer functions in formation control and their application to analysis of platoons".
The conference took place in Portland, OR, June 4-6, 2014. The title of the paper is "Harmonic instability of asymmetric bidirectional control of a vehicular platoon " and the paper was coauthored by Dan Martinec, Zdenek Hurák and Michael Šebek. The paper is now available for download at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACC.2014.6858974.
Team of Faculty of Electrical Engineering, supported heavily by members of our group, won in the CTU dragon boat race 2014 in the category for employees. Our boat excelled in qualification rounds when it won two times in a row and went directly to the final round where it beat three other boats (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Czech Institute of Informatics Robotics, and Cybernetics and Inovacentrum) and was awarded first from nine teams.
Zdeněk Hurák was awarded Fulbright scholarship for the academic year 2013/2014 and since February 1, 2014, he has been doing research at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in collaboration with his scientific host Prof. Bassam Bamieh.
Finally a publication success has coined the several-month visit of Levent Ucun from Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul at our group in 2012-13. His joint paper with Jan Salášek of our group has been accepted for publication at Mechatronics journal. The electronic version is already available on their site.
The video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHpaE2AjM-w. Jiří was invited to give the talk as the winner of the 2013 Matlab and Simulink Student Design Challenge. This is a must-see as Jiří is also sharing some experience with high performance computing. Get some frozen fish if your computer gets switched off while doing some demanding number crunching... :-)
![Image](../sites/default/files/images/20130930-130424.jpg "Last lunch with Brahim in the favourite "Jiná krajina" restaurant.")
At the end of September 2013 we said goodbye to Dr. Brahim Jawad after a year-long postdoctoral research stay with AA4CC. As a professional physicist, Brahim worked on mathematical models for our experimental platforms for distributed manipulation. Good luck, Brahim, with your carreer!
Martin Řezáč and Zdeněk Hurák succeeded in getting the results of their applied research in the domain of robust control for inertial stabilization published in Mechatronics (Elsevier) journal.
Some members of the AA4CC group have participated at experimental verification of some biological feedback controllers for inertial-on-string stabilization...:-)
Several of our excellent undergraduate and graduate students are spending their summer vacation with us, working on assigned (and paid) projects. These are almost exclusively unrelated to their school duties. Namely, Martin Gurtner is working on design and implementation of algorithms for estimation of relative angular velocity which will outperform the currently used algorithms at low angular velocities. The motivation is to improve a performance of a friction compensator. No doubt this project is aligned with our long-term work on inertial stabilization platforms.
Our doctoral student Jiří Zemánek was invited to give an overview lecture on automatic control systems at Schola ludus (an international summer school for students in science and technology) organized by University of South Bohemia in Nove Hrady in July 2013. Jiří's presentation of our field was accompanied by experimental demonstrations using Lego Mindstorms robots, Segway, SoloWheel, AR.Drone and Sphero.
Our doctoral student Jiří Zemánek won the 2013 Matlab and Simulink Student Design Challenge. The competition consisted in submitting a video documenting the use of Matlab and Simulink for solving some research engineering problem; the videos were then evaluated by The Mathworks engineers. Jiří's video shows a laboratory experimental platform for planar manipulation with one or several iron balls by shaping the magnetic field through an array of coils.
Jiří Figura, Martin Gurtner, Marek Hudec, Tomáš Michálek and Evyatar Bukai have just successfully passed their state exams and defended their final projects. The first four mentioned students were graded A and thus passed with honour. This was an extremely rare concentration of bright students. Congratulations to these excellent young engineers! We feel privileged that we will have opportunities to collaborate with them within our graduate program.