Speaker: Prof. Yi Jingang, Department of Mechanical engineering, Rutgers University
Site: Conference Room in the fourth floor in the Institute of Mechanical Control Engineering.
Time: 10:00-11:00, on the December 25,2009.
Abstract of lecture
In this talk, some research activities at the Robotics, Automation, and Mechatronics (RAM) Lab at Rutgers are presented. The first part of the talk will focus on some research activities in the vehicle and transportation area. Two subjects will be discussed: safety-preserved tire/road interaction estimation and control, and macroscopic traffic flow stability. Tire/road friction characteristics determine the vehicle’s safety limits and need to be monitored and estimated on-line for vehicle safe operations. Two different schemes for on-line estimation and control of the tire/road friction coefficient will be presented. An attractive property of these two approaches is that the estimates of the maximum friction coefficient and slip remain below their true values, which, in turn, guarantees safety of the vehicle spacing policies. Some ongoing work on the development of a “smart tire” system will be discussed. At traffic flow level, some results on macroscopic traffic flow stability will be presented. A wavefront expansion technique is applied to establish a traffic flow stability criterion for both manual and adaptive cruise controlled vehicles. The second part of the presentation will discuss a design of vision-based motion planning and trajectory tracking control of an autonomous motorcycle. A vision vector space, a unitary vector set that represents local collision-free directions in the image coordinate system, is constructed for the highly dynamic requirements of motion planning of an autonomous motorcycle. A balance and trajectory tracking control algorithm for the autonomous motorcycle is then presented. The planning and control systems are validated by experimental and numerical testing based on a real prototype motorcycle system. Other research topics in the RAM Lab will also be discussed briefly at the end of the presentation.
Introduction of the professor Yi Jingang
Jingang Yi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the ZhejiangUniversity, Hangzhou, China, in 1993, the M.Eng. degree in precision instruments from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1996, the M.A. degree in mathematics, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Dr. Yi is currently an Assistant Professor in mechanical engineering at RutgersUniversity. Prior to joining Rutgers in August 2008, he was an Assistant Professor in mechanical engineering at San DiegoStateUniversity since January 2007. From May 2002 to January 2005, he was with Lam Research Corporation, Fremont, California, as a member of Technical Staff. From January 2005 to December 2006, he was with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, TexasA&MUniversity, as a Visiting Assistant Professor. His research interests include autonomous and robotic systems, dynamic systems and control, intelligent sensing and actuation systems, mechatronics, automation science and engineering, with applications to semiconductor manufacturing, intelligent transportation and biomedical systems.
Dr. Yi is a Member of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has co-authored papers that have been awarded the Best Student Paper Award Finalist of the 2008 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, the Best Conference Paper Award Finalists of the 2007 and 2008 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, and the Kayamori Best Paper Award of the 2005 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation. Dr. Yi currently serves as an Associate Editor of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Boards. He also serves as a Guest Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.