March 13
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
The Mechanics Seminar Series is a weekly seminar given by campus and visiting speakers on topics across the spectrum of mechanics research (solids, fluids, and dynamics). Professor Xiaobo Tan is a professor at Michigan State University.
Presentation Title: Control of Underwater Robots with Localization Constraints
Abstract: A key challenge for underwater robots and vehicles is the difficulty in obtaining location measurements for them or for targets they are tasked to track. In this talk I will share a few examples of our recent work on control of underwater robots with localization constraints. I will first discuss a distributed estimation approach to cooperative localization, where a group of robots need to track a moving target (e.g., an acoustically tagged fish) based on time-difference-of-arrivals (TDOAs) of a signal emitted by the target. Then I will introduce a control barrier function approach to the incorporation of observability constraints and show its application to target tracking with only the range measurement. Finally, I will present the problem of adaptive sampling under localization uncertainties, and discuss how a multi-fidelity Gaussian process model is instrumental for best utilizing the measurement data for the reconstruction of the environmental field being sampled. Experimental results will be shown to illustrate the approaches.
Bio: Dr. Xiaobo Tan is an MSU Research Foundation Distinguished Professor and the Richard M. Hong Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in automatic control from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995, 1998, respectively, and his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland in 2002. His research interests include underwater robotics, soft robotics, smart materials, and control systems. He has published over 300 papers and been awarded 7 US patents in these areas. Dr. Tan is a Fellow of IEEE and ASME. He was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2006), MSU Teacher-Scholar Award (2010), MSU College of Engineering Withrow Distinguished Scholar Award (2018), Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Maryland (2018), MSU William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award, and multiple best paper awards. Dr. Tan is keen to integrate his research with educational and outreach activities, and has served as the PI of an NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program on addressing real-world water problems (2023-2028), Director of an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site program (2009 – 2016), and Curator of a robotic fish exhibit at MSU Museum (2016-2017). He has served the professional community in different capacities, including the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, a member of ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Executive Committee, and the general chair of 2018 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference and 2023 American Control Conference.