DSCC

All workshops will take place on Tuesday, October 10, 2017.

W1: Tire Mechanics – A Practical View Point

Organizer: Saied Taheri, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech

In this workshop, tire mechanics is reviewed with a view of the test-based practical approach resulting in better understanding of how different tire parameters/parts effect the tire force generation for handling performance. This is then used to review basic vehicle handling dynamics.

W2: Advanced Rotorcraft Control

Organizer: Cornel Sultan, Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Virginia Tech

Small or large, unmanned or manned rotary wing aircraft have recently seen major advances in terms of operational range and type of missions they can accomplish. These advances are due to a combination of novel technological developments in which advanced modern control plays a central role. For example control is a key enabler for the proliferating autonomous UAVs and for enlarging the operational envelopes of large scale helicopters. Following these advances, this workshop presents an overview of critical needs, fundamental principles, challenges related to control design for rotorcraft, along with recent contributions.

W3: Continuum Robots for Surgery: Modeling, Control and Applications

Organizers: Nabil Simaan and Long Wang, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University

The past decade has witnessed accelerated growth of medical robotics and computer-assisted medical technologies that rely on dexterous tools to enable new surgical procedures. Lately, there has been a growing trend of adopting continuum robots as a design solution for dexterous surgical intervention. These robots present modeling and control challenges beyond the standard modeling and control paradigms for rigid-link serial robots. This half-day workshop that is targeted towards graduate students interested in pursuing research in the area of continuum robot modeling, control and applications. The workshop will cover surgical applications, kinematic and static modeling, sensing, and control of these robots. The workshop will discuss the three types of continuum robots: wire-actuate single backbone, concentric tube, and multi-backbone continuum robots. Wire-actuated continuum robots use wires to bend a central continuum backbone. Multi backbone robots use push-pull actuation of a multitude of beams to achieve their equilibrium shapes. Concentric-tube robots use concentric combination of pre-curved elastic tubes and the robot motion is achieved by the rotation and extension of the tubes with respect to each other. After a presentation of history and motivations for recent applications of continuum robots, the workshop will focus on multi-backbone designs, which have found extensive usage for dexterity enhancement in many surgical applications including otolaryngology, transurethral bladder surgery, and single port access surgery. The main focus of this workshop is to review research works on modeling, control, and applications of multi-backbone continuum robots. The workshop is designed for a 4-hour meeting comprised of handouts, lectures, and discussion with the audience.

W4: Emerging Techniques in Control and Mechatronics Education: Preparing Students for the Age of IoT

Organizer: Michel Lévis, Application Engineer, Quanser Inc., Department of Engineering, Markham ON Canada

This workshop session presents recent work by Quanser in collaboration with leading universities to explore and develop modern applications and technology for adapting traditional control and mechatronics teaching to cyber-physical, IoT, and other distributed smart systems applications.

The objective of these collaborations is to establish practical, academically sound frameworks to accommodate necessary technological and methodological that is suitably harmonized with conventional curriculum but offer an engaging introduction to the essential architectures and methods of smart applications.

Specific topics in this session include:

• Key architecture and abstractions for smart system applications suitable for undergraduate courses
• Cloud-connected smart inverted pendulum application
• Review of advanced applications for smart grid and Industry 4.0.

The workshop session will offer live demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on engagement, as well as ample time for Q&A.