Dear DISC colleagues,
Welcome to the February edition of the DISC newsletter. The yearly Benelux Meeting is approaching fast and many of you have submitted abstracts for this so we look forward to seeing you at Kontakt der Kontinenten in March. We are also hard at work preparing the DISC Summer School. True to the spirit of DISC we have an inter-university team of organizers this year: Jens Kober (TUD), Manuel Maza Espinosa (TUD), Alessandro Saccon (TU/e) and Raffaela Carloni (UT). The topic will be “A Systems and Control Perspective on Human-Robot-Environment Interaction” and we will reveal some more further on in the newsletter.
Though the courses are still in full swing we are looking ahead and planning next year’s courses. I f you have suggestions, you are very welcome to put them forward!
With best regards,
Henk Nijmeijer,
scientific director
Martha Otte,
DISC secretariat
DISC Courses 2015-2016
This Academic year the following courses are scheduled:
Check the course program for dates and times.
Adaptive Control
Constructive Lyapunov Methods for Stability Analysis of Dynamical Systems
Energy-Based Modeling for Control of Physical Systems
Design Methods for Control Systems
Nonlinear Control Systems
Distributed Control and Optimization in Multi-agent Systems
Mathematical Models of Systems
System Identification for Control
In March 2016 the following courses will start:
Mathematical Models of Systems 2016
Lecturers: J.W. Polderman and K. Camlibel
System Identification for Control 2016
Lecturers: P.M.J. Van den Hof
X.J.A Bombois
The courses are taught at Hogeschool Domstad in Utrecht, location Koningsbergerstraat 9. For more information see their website. Don’t forget to register before you participate
The 35th Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control will take place in “Kontakt der Kontinenten”, Soesterberg, The Netherlands on March 22-24 2016.
The Benelux Meeting provides excellent opportunities to revitalize your contacts with DISC (and Belgian) colleagues. On Thursday March 24 the winner of the DISC Best Thesis Award will be announced and we will award the DISC certificates for a completed PhD course program.
Please check the website for more information http://www.beneluxmeeting.nl/2016/
The DISC Summer School will take place from June 14-17 in Centerparcs Zandvoort. The topic is “A Systems and Control Perspective on Human-Robot-Environment Interaction”.
The focus of the summer school is on modelling and control aspects for robotic systems, possibly composed by multiple collaborative agents, requiring human-robot and robot-environment physical interactions. More information will be available soon, please check the website for the latest news
We have started preparing the course program for 2016-2017 and we would value your input. If you are a staff member and would like to teach a course please let us know. We also value input form PhD students about which course they like to see included in the course program. Email your suggestions to m.w.otte@tudelft.nl
In March we will start a pilot and record the course Mathematical Models of Systems. The recordings will be made available on vimeo afterwards. In the next academic year the recordings will be actively used. Students will be expected to watch the lectures beforehand and the classes in Utrecht will have a more interactive character. If this pilot is successful then more courses will be recorded.
On January 21, 2016 there was a celebratory workshop at the University of Eindhoven in honour of Henk Nijmeijer’s 60th birthday. The organisers were Nathan van der Wouw; Inez Lopez; Erjen Lefeber and Geertje Jansen-Dols. Speakers from all over the world, ranging former collaborators to former PhD students, were invited to give a talk about their relationship with Henk and their current research. The program can be found here
The speakers each contributed a paper which will be published in book form by Springer, in 2016. The title of the book is “Nonlinear Systems: Techniques for Dynamical Analysis and Control” and it will be published in the series “Lecture Notes in Control and information Sciences”. Read more about it here.
In 20
14 Paul Van den Hof stepped down as scientific director of DISC but up till now there hadn’t been opportunity for a farewell party. In the past year two DISC board members also announced they were retiring from the board: Arjan van der Schaft had been a board member since 2000 and Rikus Eising was chairman for 20 years. These goodbyes were combined on January 30 when the DISC board met up in Utrecht and all three were thanked for their service to DISC with a dinner and speeches.
The next course of the Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Networks will start on March 7, 2016 :
Compressive sensing of low-complexity signals: theory, algorithms and extensions
Lecturer : Prof. Laurent JACQUES (UCL/ICTEAM, Image and Signal Processing Group)
Dates & schedule :
March 7, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 2016 (9:30 – 12:30)
The courses will take place at UCL, Bâtiment Euler, 4 av. Georges Lemaître, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (room A002, ground floor).
Check the website for more information
Delft University of Technology
Name: Sebastiaan Mulders
Starting date: January 13, 2016
Function: PhD
Email:s.p.mulders@tudelft.nl
Group: DCSC
Supervisor: dr. ir. J.W. van Wingerden
Project: Continuous time model identification of the Delft Offshore Turbine
Hello, my name is Sebastiaan Mulders, 25 years old. I was raised in a small village called Velserbroek close to Haarlem. After I finished high school, I moved to Delft where I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Systems and Control. I performed my graduation project on a self-learning algorithm for fatigue load reductions of two-bladed wind turbines, and now I am in the wind energy group performing system identification and control on a wind turbine with fluid power transmission. Later I will focus on continuous time closed-loop system identification of the turbine. My hobbies are boot camp training, spinning, cooking and fixing computers.
Twente University
Name: T.H. (Tjark) Post
Starting date: 01-02-2016
Function: Researcher
Email: t.h.post@utwente.nl
Group: Robotics and Mechatronics
Supervior: S. Stramigioli
Project: Aeroworks
Hi, I am Tjark. After receiving my MSc. degree at the University of Twente I was offered to keep working in the AEROWORKS project. The AEROWORKS project is a European project aiming to develop a new generation of UAVs which are capable of autonomously executing infrastructure inspection and maintenance work. In Twente we mainly focus on the aerial manipulation part. To perform outdoor experiments we need UAVs which can localize themselves very precise outdoor. My task is to facilitate the outdoor operation of our UAVs such that we can do our aerial manipulation experiments in realistic scenarios.
Eindhoven University of Technology
Name: Leroy Hazeleger
Function: PhD
Starting date: 18-01-2016
Email: l.hazeleger@tue.nl
Group: Dynamics & Control
Project: Hybrid solutions for cost-aware high-performance motion control (CHAMeleon)
Supervisor/promotor: prof.dr.ir. N. van de Wouw
Hello everybody, my name is Leroy Hazeleger, I am 25 years old and I was born in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands.
In 2008 I moved to Eindhoven, where I started the bachelor Mechanical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
After receiving my bachelor’s degree in 2012, I started the master program Systems and Control in the Dynamics and Control group at the same university.
My master’s thesis project was on the topic of second-order reset elements for improved stage control design, which I finished in 2015.
As of January 18th, I am a PhD candidate in the Dynamics and Control group, working on the project CHAMeleon: “Hybrid solutions for cost-aware high-performance motion control”.
In this project, I will focus on developing adaptive strategies for automated performance optimization of hybrid controllers.
Name: Daniel Veldman
Starting date: February 1, 2016
Function: PhD member
Email: d.w.m.veldman@tue.nl
Group: Dynamics & Control
Supervisor:Dr.ir. R.H.B. Fey
Hello everybody! My name is Daniël Veldman. I am 25 years old and born was born in Nijmegen. I recently completed a master Mechanical Engineering at TU/e (November 2015) and a master Mathematical Sciences at Utrecht University (January 2016). Starting from February 1, I am PhD student in the Dynamics and Control group at TU/e. I will be working on the project “Integral thermal/mechanical modeling and control design”. The aim of the project is to develop efficient models for the thermal and mechanical effects in structures, that can be used for control design. Thermal effects are one of the most My hobbies include reading and playing piano (classical).
Name: Dhruv Khandelwal
Starting date: 11 January 2016
Function: PhD student
Email: d.khandelwal@tue.nl
Group: Control Systems group
Supervisor: Roland Toth
Project: Control And Data-driven modelling Using SYmbolic methods (CADUSY)
Dhruv Khandelwal has started as a PhD candidate working on the project titled – “Control And Data-driven modelling Using SYmbolic methods (CADUSY)”, under the supervision of dr. R. Toth. Dhruv received a BTech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from VIT University, India. He subsequently completed an MSc degree in Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. His graduation project “Model-based fault diagnosis for inkjet printheads” was completed under the supervision of prof. S. Weiland.
Groningen University
Name: Li WANG
Starting date: 01-02-2016
Position: PhD Student
Email: LI.WANG@rug.nl
Group: JBI-Mathematics and Computer Science Institute Groningen
Supervisor: prof. Arjan van der Schaft
Project: Control of input-output contact systems: application to the control of chemical processes and biological systems
Hello, I’m Li WANG, a new PhD student in the group of Prof. Van der Schaft. From 2013, I started my PhD project with Prof. Bernhard Maschke in Laboratory of Automatics and Process Engineering in University of Lyon 1, Lyon, France. I have been working on the control of input-output contact systems and its application to the thermodynamic systems, specializing in stabilization of control contact systems with structure preserving feedback. Then I turn my attention to the analysis of the irreversible port Hamiltonian system for the chemical reaction networks, especially for the non-isothemal chemical reaction networks based on the mass and energy balance. After extending our results on the closed chemical reaction network to an open chemical reaction network with constant inflow/outflow, my current work focus on the analysis of interconnections between two chemical reaction networks.
University of Groningen
Candidate: Robert Huisman
Group: ENTEG
Thesis: High performance motion control for cryogenic nano positioning mechanisms. Application to the METIS Cold Chopper mechanism
Promotor: prof. dr. B. (Bayu) Jayawardhana and prof. dr. ir. J.M.A. (Jacquelien) Scherpen
Date: February 12, 2016
Location: Aula, Groningen University
Time: 14.30 uur
Candidate: Jieqiang Wei
Group: RUG-JBI
Thesis: Consensus Dynamics in Distribution Networks and Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems
Promotor: Prof. dr. Arjan van der Schaft
Date: 18 March 2016
Location: Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen
Time: 11.00 AM
Twente University
Candidate: S.S. (Stefan) Groothuis
Group: Robotics and Mechatronics
Thesis: On the Modeling, Design, and Control of Compliant Robotic Manipulators
Promotor: Prof.dr.ir. S. Stramigioli
Date: 02-06-2016
Location: University of Twente
Time: 14.45 hours
The next issue of this Newsletter will appear in March 2016.
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
