Research seminars

Research seminars

Abstract

The use of networks or arrays of sensors has gained increasing interest over the past decade driven by a number of factors including the availability of reliable low cost sensor elements and their associated electronics, the ease of access to communications networks, especially wireless, and the increasing computation power that can be embedded into devices.  The latter of these factors has enabled increasingly sophisticated routines to be implemented for real time operation, which are able to exploit more fully the information available from the sensor array and invert the measurements from the sensor to output parameters of interest by the end users.  In addition, target system can be analysed with increasing realistic forward models, which in turn allows more effective inversion algorithms to be formulated.

This seminar considers the case of arrays of simple electromagnetic sensor and describes how the drivers for collaborative sensor networks can be exploited to realise new and advanced sensor systems.  The talk will focus of several examples of the application of electromagnetic arrays from recent work at Manchester across a variety of sectors including computer networks, security equipment and industrial processes.  Although the applications are quite diverse the underlying approach and the electromagnetic inversion techniques have similarities.

Speaker biography

Tony Peyton is a Professor of Electromagnetic Tomography Engineering at the University of Manchester and specialises in the application of electromagnetic sensors for inspection and non-destructive testing, with over 20 years of industrial and academic experience.  He has worked with many different companies and been involved in several EU projects.  His group is a partner in the recently announced Centre of Research Excellence for Advanced Cooperative Systems (ACROSS), which is a major EU initiative in this field and led by the University of Zagreb.

Abstract

I will discuss some of our recent work that brings the benefits of model predictive control to small-scale, high-speed systems and that can dramatically reduce online MPC loop execution to microsecond timescales. We show how our new real-time MPC schemes provide constraint satisfaction and stability, while optimizing for performance, at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art. No single real-time optimization method will be able to tackle the broad range of possible problem classes, and so we present various techniques suitable for fast-sampled systems in the range of nano-, micro- and milli-seconds respectively. The controller synthesis methodologies are unique in that they take the available online computational resources as input and produce a controller that will execute within these bounds while satisfying constraints and stabilizing the system. I will motivate our work on real-time MPC with several applications, including power systems, race cars and quadrocopters. Industrial examples will be presented throughout, which serve to highlight theoretical advancements and the extensive software tools that help to bring the developed theory to bear in practical scenarios.

Speaker biography

Manfred Morari was appointed head of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich in 2009. He was head of the Automatic Control Laboratory from 1994 to 2008. Before that he was the McCollum-Corcoran Professor of Chemical Engineering and Executive Officer for Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained the diploma from ETH Zurich and the Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, both in chemical engineering. His interests are in hybrid systems and the control of biomedical systems. In recognition of his research contributions he received numerous awards, among them the Donald P. Eckman Award, the John R. Ragazzini Award and the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the Allan P. Colburn Award and the Professional Progress Award of the AIChE, the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award of the ASEE, Doctor Honoris Causa from Babes-Bolyai University, Fellow of IEEE, IFAC and AIChE, the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (U.S.). Manfred Morari has held appointments with Exxon and ICI plc and serves on the technical advisory boards of several major corporations.

Abstract

The practical deployment of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) using unlicensed ISM band within dense urban scenarios is difficult due to the increasing number of wireless devices operating in those licensed exempt frequencies. For this reason, current research on WMN is directed towards novel and more flexible network paradigms which would allow the WMN to dynamically adapt to the environmental interference conditions. Here, we propose Urban-X, which is a novel cross-layer architecture for self-organizing WMNs over urban scenarios. Urban-X combines elements from classical Multi-Radio Multi-Channel (MC-MR) technology with novel Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) mechanisms. The self-organizing behavior is achieved through a novel distributed channel assignment scheme, an adaptive multi-path routing scheme and a flexible layer 2.5 channel and path scheduler algorithm. Based on the current interference on each channel, Urban-X performs channel allocation among the nodes of the WMN, updates the available paths towards the gateways and distributes the internal traffic among the paths/channels in order to maximize the network throughput while minimizing interference to the external networks. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-layer approach in terms of increased throughput compared to
traditional routing schemes for WMNs, and its adaptiveness to the variation in channel conditions and external user traffic.

Speaker biography

Andreas J. Kassler is currently Full Professor of Computer Science at Karlstads Universitet, Karlstad, Sweden, which he joined in 2005. From 2003 to 2004, Dr. Andreas J. Kassler was Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Dr. Andreas J. Kassler is co-chairing the Distributed Systems and Communication group (DISCO) and maintains an active research program in the fields of wireless networking and distributed multimedia systems.
Dr. Andreas J. Kassler received the Docent title (Habilitation) in Computer Science from Karlstads Universitet in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Universität Ulm, Germany, in 2002. He received the M. Sc. degree in Mathematics/Computer Science in 1995 from Universität Augsburg, Germany.

Currently, Dr. Andreas J. Kassler is member of the steering committee of the Department of Computer Science of Karlstads Universitet, where he teaches courses at the M. Sc. and Ph. D. levels on wireless networking, advanced topics in computer networking and distributed systems. His main research interests include Wireless Meshed Networks, Ad-Hoc Networks, Future Internet, Multimedia Networking, Quality of Service, and P2P systems.

He is co-author of around 100 peer reviewed conference and journal publications, 4 European or international patents, co-editor of a book published in the LNCS book series of Springer. He served as a guest editor of a feature topic in EURASIP Wireless Communications and Networking Journal, and served as Associate Editor on the editorial boards of some refereed international journals, such as: Journal of Internet Engineering, International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services. Finally, he was appointed as Editor-in Chief of the IARIA International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology.