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GRASP Special Seminar – Andrzej Banaszuk, Suresh Kannan & Alberto Speranzon, UTRC, “Autonomous and Intelligent Systems at United Technologies Research Center”

February 15, 2012 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

AbstractWe
will present UTRC’s research initiative in Autonomous and
Intelligent Systems with an emphasis on complex human/machine intelligent
systems including unmanned rotorcraft. The research, conducted by a diverse
team of researchers in dynamical systems, control, applied mathematics,
computer vision, and embedded systems (in partnership with several leading
universities including CMU, MIT, Caltech, and BU) includes:

  • Real-time
    algorithms for dynamic collision avoidance in an obstacle-rich environment
    using probabilistic roadmaps.
  • Multi-vehicle
    missions including efficient search algorithms based on ergodic theory methods.
  • Multi-vehicle
    navigation with imperfect and intermittent sensors in GPS degraded
    environments.
  • Intelligent
    system design methodology including architectures for autonomy, formal
    verification, and stochastic planners.

We
will present research problems of interest to UTRC and discuss existing and
future career opportunities in the broad area of robotics, with particular
focus on perception, machine intelligence, and human-machine interaction.

Presenter

- Learn More

Andrzej Banaszuk is a Fellow and a Program Leader of
Sikorsky Program Office at United Technologies Research Center. Since joining
UTRC in 1997, he has conducted research in analysis, design, and control of
dynamical systems applied to jet engines, rotorcraft, electric power networks,
and buildings. Since
2000 he has led collaborative multi-university research teams in the area of
flow control, control of combustion instabilities, and robust design of large
uncertain dynamic networks. He is an author
of 41 journal papers, 70 conference papers, and 6 patents. From 1999 to
2002, he was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Controls Systems
Technology. He was appointed to serve on the Board of Governors of IEEE Control
Systems Society in 2004. For his work on
active and passive control of flow instabilities in jet engines he received
IEEE Controls Systems Technology Award in 2007. He became an IEEE Fellow in
2011. He holds Ph.D. in EE from Warsaw
University of Technology and in Mathematics from Georgia Institute of
Technology.

Suresh Kannan contributed to the formation of the UAV
Research Facility at the Georgia Institute of Technology in late 90’s, with the
goal of flight testing advanced adaptive control algorithms. His work has been
in the areas of model reference adaptive control, systems in cascade,
saturation and vision based algorithms for guidance and control. Specific
examples include an all envelope 6-DOF adaptive control algorithm for air
vehicles. Applications of this work have included some firsts, such as the
transition from forward-flight to hover and back of a tilt-body autonomous
aircraft, the first vision based formation flight between two UAV’s and the
autonomous launch of one rotorcraft from another. His earlier work includes
distributed software architectures that enable advanced control algorithms.
Other interests include Artificial Intelligence, new hardware-software
paradigms for unmanned flight and software/algorithmic systems with stability
properties. Suresh
earned a MEng in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK,
in 1996, Master’s and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in
2002 and 2005 respectively. He also spent time as a visiting researcher at
Rolls-Royce Commercial Aero Engines, Derby, UK.

Alberto
Speranzon received a “Laurea” degree in Computer Engineering from
University of Padova, Italy, in November 2000. In May 2006 he received a Ph.D.
in Automatic Control from the School of Electrical Engineering, Royal Institute
of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Between May 2006 and October 2006 he was
post-doc at the same institute. Between November 2006 and August 2008 he was
Marie Curie Research Fellow at Unilever R&D Port Sunlight, United Kingdom.
During the period 2007 and 2008 he regularly visited the University of
California at Berkeley, USA. Currently he is a scientist at United Technologies
Research Center, East Hartford, CT, USA. His research interests are in the
broad area of distributed computation over networked systems, analysis of large
scale systems and adaptive estimation for autonomous vehicles.

Details

Date:
February 15, 2012
Time:
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Event Category: