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Research in the area is geared towards improving the performance of systems through the use of feedback and advanced algorithms. A broad range of systems are under investigation, including autonomous vehicles, land-based gas turbines, computer networks, magnetic levitation transportation, and brain-computer interfacing.
Advances in the area are fueled not only by the increased amount of computation that can be employed to compute and implement feedback control laws and advanced algorithms, but also by new developments in hybrid control brought about by the merging of computer science techniques for discrete systems with control-theoretic results for continuous systems.
Some highlights of the past year:
Autonomous Vehicles
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A number of researchers are involved in the design and construction of autonomous vehicles, both land based and sea based. While work has continued in applying advanced control techniques to land-based vehicles and intelligent transportation systems, a new thrust has involved the development of miniature underwater robots. The target application of this effort is to use platoons of such robots for rapid and adaptive environmental sensing in the Chesapeake Bay and nearby costal waters.
Motor Drives and Magnetic Levitation
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The major thrust in this area is the design of a commuter system for the Virginia Tech campus based on linear propulsion and magnetic levitation technologies. In addition, work continues on high performance motor drives for military, aerospace and consumer applications. A new application area involves the design of variable-speed motor drives for weapons elevators.
Communication Networks and Computer Systems
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Work in this area focuses on applying new developments in nonlinear feedback control and the control and verification of hybrid systems to problems in real-time computer operating systems and the performance of computer communication networks.
Advanced Signal Processing Algorithms
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Major progress has been made in understanding the causes of the enhanced performance — above the steady-state optimal value — of certain adaptive filtering algorithms. Work is now underway to exploit these effects in applications involving noise cancellation, equalization, and adaptive prediction. Research is continuing in the areas of speech coding, direction-of-arrival estimation, and EEG modeling for brain-computer interfacing.
Active Combustion Control
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Current research aims to develop simple adaptive control algorithms for the suppression of thermo-acoustic combustion instabilities. Fuel injection actuators that can only be pulsed on-off and have significant time delays associated with their response are of particular interest. Work also continues on the development of models to predict instabilities and lean blowout from first principles and empirical data.
See Also: Systems & Controls Laboratories & Groups
Recent News Items Regarding Systems & Controls Research
- A systems approach to conquering Type 2 diabetes (April 2004)
- Designing a $1000 switched-reluctance home elevator (April 2004)
- New unmanned systems group taps multidisciplinary expertise (April 2004)
- Underwater Autonomous Robots to Map, Track Coastal & River Waters (April 2003) (Feb 2003)
- Tech Autonomous Vehicles Round the Bend for Museum (April 2003)
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2-page description of ECE Systems & Controls research from the 2004 Annual Report. (185 KB)
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