Workshops

Workshop on Mechatronics Education

Description: The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss recent advances and challenges in the field of mechatronics education. The multi-disciplinary nature of the field includes topics from controls theory, mechanism design, microprocessor programming and system integration, to name a few. Furthermore, the wide application of mechatronic systems does allow for increased interest in the field, however, has resulted in education challenges - what, why and how to teach the topics in a limited time-frame? The timeline typically being one (or two) semester course(s). It would be safe to say that almost every university offers a course in mechatronics that is being taught by extremely passionate and creative educators. Some of these pedagogies are communicated to the public through research papers at conferences, however, most remain with the educators, while being fine-tuned over multiple years. This workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to present and discuss the pedagogies for mechatronics education and their perspective of what is fundamental knowledge with the focus on curating resources (including experiments, projects) that encompass multi-disciplinary education. This will be done through a series of invited talks, a solicited poster session, and an interactive panel discussion.

Topics of interest:

• Control theory
• Mechanism design
• Microprocessor programming
• System integration
• Circuit design
• Modeling and simulation
• Autonomous motion planning and navigation
• Service Robots
• Robot Friendly Environment

Program

Workshop on Dynamic Cohesive Tracking in Networks

Description: Longitudinal cruise control with small inter-vehicle distances, for improved fuel efficiency, and increased traffic throughput, requires each vehicle in the network to move similarly, such as during speed transitions at traffic intersections. Likewise, a network of robots transporting a flexible object need to maintain distance-based formation to avoid object deformation during transport. Therefore, cohesive transitions of networked multi agent systems, where each agent in the network responds similarly, is essential for multi-agent systems. A challenge is that current neighbor-based network control approaches mainly focus on achieving cohesion at the end but not during the transition, e.g., by improving the convergence rate of network responses to the final cohesive state. Increasing the response speed of each agent in the network helps achieve this transition in a shorter amount of time, but cohesion can still be lost during the transition. Cohesion in networks can be achieved through a centralized controller to ensure each agent performs similar actions, for instance using wireless communication. However, such centralized approaches require explicit inter-agent communication, which incurs additional infrastructure cost, and can be susceptible to cybersecurity threats where intruder agents obtain access to the network information. This workshop presents recent research developing decentralized network control strategies for cohesive network transitions, for achieving cohesion not just at the end of the transition but also during the transition.

Relevance to mechatronics - Cohesion during transition in networks, from one consensus state to another, can be as important as achieving the final state for several mechatronics applications such as, connected automated vehicles (CAVs), robotic multi-agent systems and distributed sensor networks. For instance, heavy-duty trucks arranged in a platoon formation lead to reduced wind resistance for fuel savings, provided the following vehicles can safely maintain close spacing in the platoon, or, in transportation of flexible object using a team of robots without potentially damaging by maintaining formation during the transportation task.

In this workshop, decentralized control techniques to maintain cohesiveness in networks are presented. The interconnections between the proposed cohesive control technique for engineered networks and information transfer in swarm networks, such as bird flocks, are presented. The application of the proposed cohesive control techniques is presented for,

i) flexible object transport using multi-robot networks, and,
ii) connected vehicle networks for increasing signalized intersection capacities.

Topics of interest:

• Achieving ideal cohesion in networked systems
• Reduced deformation transportation of flexible-objects using robot networks
• Constant spacing in vehicle platoons subject to communication delays

Program