Current Seminars
Robotics in the Middle-East - Wednesday 15th February 2012, 1-2pm
Speaker: Mr Mohamed Mustafa
Location: D45a Sackville St Building (provisional)
Abstract: Prior to joining the University of Manchester as an MSc. student, Mohamed worked as research engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where he was involved in several robotics projects activities. These collaborative projects included: Educational Robotics & Botball, Mobile Robots Navigation, and Computer Vision Applications in Mobile Robots. In this seminar he will give a brief description of these projects and will talk about his major role in each.
**Dr Alexandru Stancu’s seminar, originally scheduled for 25th January, is postponed. Watch this space**.
Multipliers for absolute stability - Wednesday 18th January 2012, 1-2pm
Speaker: Dr Joaquin Carrasco
Location: D45a Sackville St Building (provisional)
Abstract: Multipliers are often used to find conditions for the absolute stability of Lur'e systems. They can be used either in conjunction with passivity theory or within the more recent framework of integral quadratic constraints (IQCs). The seminar focuses the use of multipliers in both approaches. Briefly,
- The passivity theorem is developed from an energetic point of view. If either both interconnected systems are not able to generate energy or the energy produced by one of them is dissipated by the other, then the feedback system cannot produce energy. Hence the energy of the system cannot increase by more than the energy provided at the inputs. The concept of causality is essential to this argument.
- The IQC theorem is developed using a homotopy argument. If the open-loop system is stable, and the closed-loop system can be rewritten as a ``well-behaved'' homotopy transformation of the open-loop system, then the closed-loop system must preserve the stability of the open-loop system. Causality is not required for this argument.
The causality in passivity theory requires that any multipliers must have a canonical factorization. It has been suggested in the literature that this represents an advantage of the IQC theory. However, under some mild conditions the factorization is ensured and an equivalence between both theories can be stated. If possible, the seminar will try to introduce these concepts for a lay audience.
Using Control Theory to Solve Industrial Problems - Monday 28th November, 1:30-3:30pm
Speaker: Dr Paul Oram, BP Exploration
Location: D45a Sackville St Building
Abstract: The seminar is targeted for MSc students, but anyone is welcome to attend. Paul will be discussing applied control systems in both the upstream and downstream oil and gas industry.
Evolutionary algorithms in control systems engineering - Wednesday 16 Nov 2011, 2:30-3:30
Speaker: Dr Alex Shenfield, Manchester Metropolitan University
Location: D45a Sackville St Building
Abstract: Evolutionary algorithms are novel soft computing techniques based around concepts from natural selection. Their stochastic and population based nature ensures that they are robust in the presence of both noise and multimodal search landscapes, making them a powerful tool for the optimisation of realworld problems in control systems engineering. EAs are not limited by features such as ill-behaved objective functions, the existence of constraints, or variations in the nature of variables. Until recently their application to large scale real world problems was limited by the computational complexity of evaluating many thousands of potential solutions; however, recent developments in high performance and parallel computing have opened up application areas that were previously too computationally expensive (such as the evolutionary design of Hinfinity controllers for the lateral stability of aircraft and the optimisation of maintenance schedules for aeroengines). This talk will provide an introduction to evolutionary algorithms and their application in the field of control systems engineering, as well as outlining some recent advances in evolutionary algorithm theory and applications.
See also the CSC seminar archive and the internal student seminar series