Abstract for Lecture:

Using a group of robots to achieve a common task is usually more efficient and with more operational capability than a single robot especially for tasks which are difficult or impossible for an individual robot to complete, such as co-manipulations in Industrial 4.0, combat, surveillance, mapping, and underwater mine hunting etc. In recent years, the cooperative control of multi-robot systems has been an active area of research with formulations such as collaborative robots (COBOTs), swarming, flocking, foraging, consensus and rendezvous, etc. This type of system is composed of several intelligent agents which interact with each other through communication channels, which imposes challenges in control to deal with the constraints such as time delays, data losses and bandwidth limitations. In this presentation, research on cooperative robotic systems in the Advanced Control and Mechatronics Lab at Dalhousie University will be introduced. Specifically, the presentation will focus on the distributed event-triggered formation control and adaptive robust control for multiple aerial and ground vehicles, and multiple manipulator systems. Extensive simulation and experimental results of the proposed schemes will be demonstrated.

About the Lecturer:

Ya-Jun Pan is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Dalhousie University, Canada. Her main   research interests are robust nonlinear control, cyber physical systems, intelligent robotics, haptics and collaborative   multiple robotic systems. She has served as Associate Editors for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE/ASME   Transactions on Mechatronics, and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. She has served as Vice President-Atlantic Region   of  CSME, Canada, IEEE IES AdCom, and Program Co-Chairs for international conferences. She has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany and Research Excellence Award at Dalhousie University. She is a Fellow of Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), a Fellow of ASME, a Senior Member of IEEE, a Member of CSME and a registered Professional Engineer in Nova Scotia, Canada.