Dear all,
Over the past couple of weeks some of the restrictions have been lifted and this process will continue in the coming months. Very slowly the outlines of the “new normal” are becoming visible. We are contemplating what this will mean for DISC. Will we be able to host courses in Utrecht next academic year? How to proceed with the ECC 2021 that we are organising? Much remains to be seen.
For June we have had to cancel the course “Stability, Relative Stability and Synchronization of Dynamical Systems with Time-delay” but we are happy to report that “Modelling and Control of Hybrid Systems” will be offered online. The online LMI course was very well received and we have faith this one will also be a success!
Best wishes,
Henk Nijmeijer
Scientific director
Martha Otte
DISC secretariat
The course “Stability, Relative Stability and Synchronization of Dynamical Systems with Time-delay” has been cancelled and will be offered again next academic year.
The course Modelling and Control of Hybrid Systems
will be offered online, starting on June 22. For more information and registration please visit the DISC Course Platform.
Tamas Keviczky (TUD-DCSC) has been promoted to full professor Networked Cyber-Physical Systems. Tamas Keviczky received his Ph.D. degree from the Control Science and Dynamical Systems Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Since 2015 he has been Associate professor at DCSC, where he started working in 2007.
His research interests include distributed optimization and optimal control, model predictive control, embedded optimization-based control and estimation of large-scale systems with applications in aerospace, automotive and mobile robotics, industrial processes, and infrastructure systems such as water, heat, and electricity networks.
Visit Tamas’ personal page for more information.
From May 12-15 the ECC 2020 was held in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In fact everyone participated from home as the Corona pandemic necessitated the organizers to switch to an online format. It is customary that at the end of the meeting the general chair of the conference hands over the conference to the next general chair. Alexander Fradkov and Henk Nijmeijer managed to overcome the limitations of being in two different locations and the rule was symbolically handed to Henk.
Of course the pandemic also has consequences for the planned ECC 2021 in Rotterdam. The organisers are currently considering alternatives such as a hybrid conference.
The department of Electrical Engineering has position open for a PhD Planar Stage Technology Development.
For more information see: https://jobs.tue.nl/en/vacancy/phd-planar-stage-technology-development-849818.html
Delft University of Technology
Name: Vishal Sawant
Starting date: 15-5-2020
Function: Postdoc
Group: CoR
Supervisor: Laura Ferranti
Vishal Sawant was born in Sangli, India in 1988.
He received his Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree from the Mumbai university, in 2010 and Master of Technology (M.Tech.) degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, in 2012.
He then worked as a software engineer at Broadcom Limited from July, 2012 to October, 2013 and at Sandvine Limited from November, 2013 to July, 2014. After that he pursued his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay. His research interests include optimal control, multi-agent systems and distributed optimization. His hobbies are swimming and watching movies/TV serials.
Name: Ksander de Winkel
Starting date: 01-6-2020
Function: Assistant professor
Group: CoR
Supervisor: Riender Happee
June first was my first official day as assistant professor in the Intelligent Vehicles group, under the supervision of Riender Happee. I would hereby like to take a brief moment of your time to introduce myself.
I studied Applied Cognitive Psychology at Utrecht University, which is where I developed my scientific interest in how the external world is transformed into subjective experience by the brain. After obtaining my Master’s degree, I started a PhD project on multisensory interactions in self-motion perception, which I completed in 2013. I then continued along this line of research at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics; first as a post-doc, and since 2017 also as project leader for the “Motion Perception and Simulation” research group. In the work we did there, we strived to gain a comprehensive understanding of human self-motion perception, and we explored applications of this knowledge in the field of motion simulator control algorithms, rehabilitation, and motion sickness.
In my new position at TU Delft, I will focus on motion sickness, and more generally on the subjective experience of comfort, in the context of autonomous vehicles. I aim to contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms that ultimately result in motion sickness, how it develops from mild discomfort to frank sickness, why individuals are so different in terms of their susceptibility, and how minute changes in subjective (dis-)comfort can be quantified accurately and precisely.
When I’m not working, I enjoy rocking out while playing my ukulele and fiddling with classic motorcycles.
Name: Wicak Ananduta
Starting date: 15-04-2020
Function: Postdoc
Email: w.ananduta@tudelft.nl
Group: DCSC
Supervisor: Sergio Grammatico
I am a new postdoctoral researcher and just joining Sergio’s group. I was born in Bali and grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia. I pursued a Ph.D. degree at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona and I successfully defended my thesis last December. Prior to that, I spent two years studying at DCSC and obtained a master’s degree in systems and control. Now, I will be working on game-theoretic control approaches, including equilibrium seeking problems on mixed-integer games and their applications. Outside of work, I enjoy playing badminton a lot if I am not spending time with my family. As I am starting my work remotely from Jakarta, I am looking forward to coming to Delft
Name: Khushraj Nanik Madnani
Starting date: 01-01-2020
Function: Postdoc
Email: k.n.madnani-1@tudelft.nl
Group: DCSC
Supervisor: Manuel Mazo
In a single line, I am a computer scientist, pretending to be a logician. I have done my Bachelor of Technology in Computer Engineering from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India. I started as a Masters student at Department of Computer Science & Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India where I was affiliated with the Centre for Formal Design and Verification of Software (Formal Methods Group in CSE, IITB) in fall 2011. In 2013, I converted to a M Tech. + PhD. dual degree program. During my masters and PhD., I worked on decidable extensions of temporal logic for real time systems and their connections with Alternating Timed Automata. I defended my thesis titled “On Decidable Extensions of Metric Temporal Logic” in August, 2019.
During my Post Doctoral duration in DCSC, TU Delft, I will be associated with SENTIENT Project under Prof. Manuel Mazo Jr. Here, we aim at addressing modelling and automated scheduling of Communication Traffic in Event Triggered Control Systems. My role in this project is to come up with suitable extensions of Timed Automata and their abstractions for modelling of such traffic and coming up with efficient algorithms for scheduling the Network Traffic. I also plan to expand my domain of expertise by working on other important problems within the scope of Hybrid Systems.
Eindhoven University of Technology
Name: Marvin Baart
Starting date: 15 April 2020
Function: Junior Researcher
Email: m.h.m.baart@tue.nl
Group: Dynamics & Control
Supervisor: Prof.dr. H. Nijmeijer
Project: VETIS
My name is Marvin Baart, 24 years old and recently graduated for my Automotive Technology master with the Dynamics & Control specialization. I am working as a Junior Researcher in the Dynamics & Control group for the VETIS project. This project is about electric transport in cities and I will be focusing on the telemetry data compression for the electric city busses.
Name: Bas Kessels
Starting date: May 1, 2020
Function: PhD
Email: B.M.Kessels@tue.nl
Group: Dynamics & Control
Supervisor: Prof.dr.ir. N. van de Wouw
Project: Automated model updating of digitals twins
I started my Mechanical Engineering bachelor in 2014 in Eindhoven, after which I continued studying for my master’s degree in the Dynamics & Control group. In January, I finished my thesis which was about finding dynamic modes of multiple components, which are then used to produce reduced models of those components, such that a reduced model of an assembly of multiple components is as accurate as possible (depending on the number of DOFs in the reduced model). This project (also supervised by Nathan and Rob) was done in collaboration with ASML, where I also spend most of my time studying this topic. After having taken some time off to enjoy some of my hobbies (such as woodworking), I am now ready to commit to a new challenge in which I will be investigating the automated model updating within a digital twinning context.
University of Groningen
Name: Danica K. Tan
Starting date: 01-06-2020
Function: PhD student
Email: d.k.tan@rug.nl
Group: Robotics Group – Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Supervisor: prof. dr. Raffaella Carloni
Project: Soft robotics
Hoi! My name is Danica Tan. I have a BSc in Engineering Science & Mechanics from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in the US and recently graduated with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Twente. Throughout both my bachelor’s and master’s I specialized in biomechanics, and I am particularly interested in soft actuation and medical robotics. So, for my thesis at Twente I designed magnetically actuated soft robotic manipulators for mesoscale soft robots intended to be used for minimally-invasive surgery. My current research project is being done under the auspices of the MAGNIFY Project. Its focus is on the design, characterization, and modelling of an electroactive artificial muscle. In my free time, I enjoy writing and hiking.
Delft University of Technology
Candidate: Tope Agbana
Group: DCSC
Thesis: Smart Optics Against Smart Parasites. Towards point-of-care optical diagnosis of malaria and urogenital schistosomiasis
Promotores: Prof.dr.ir. M. Verhaegen and Prof.dr. G. Vdovin
Date: May 6, 2020
Location: TUD, Online
Maastricht University
Candidate: Katharina Schüller
Group: Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University
Thesis: “On Agent-Based Models of Sex, Plants and Sustainability”
Promotor: Frank Thuijsman & Ralf Peeters, Co-promoter: Kateřina Staňková
Date: Wednesday May 27
Location: online
Time: 10:00
Eindhoven University of Technology
Candidate: Z. Ye
Group: Dynamics & Control
Thesis: Implementation, modeling, and exploration of precision visual servo systems
Promotor: Prof.dr. H. Nijmeijer & prof.dr.ir.P.P.Jonker
Date: May 26 2020
Location: TU/e, Online
Time: 4pm
University of Groningen
Candidate: Yuri Kapitaniuk
Group: ENTEG
Thesis: Motion control algorithms for mobile vehicles and marine crafts
Promotores: Prof. M. Cao and Prof. J.M.A. Scherpen
Date: May 29, 2020
Time: 12.45
Location: Aula Academy building
The next issue of this Newsletter will appear in July 2020.
We encourage the contributors to provide newsworthy information. In principle, we intend to publish any message offered. However, we reserve the right to edit certain parts of a submission.
Please send your contributions to: m.w.otte@tudelft.nl
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