CPS Events
CROSS/CPSRC Seminar: Getting started with ROS and Gazebo
Abstract:
In large part, the recent advancements in robotics have been made possible by open source tools. Open Robotics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software in robotics, supports two main projects — ROS (Robot Operating System) and Gazebo, a multirobot simulator — both of which are widely used by the global robotics community, including industry, academia, and hobbyists.
ROS is a framework that lets you quickly set up the various parts of a robot and get them all to work together as a meaningful application. ROS does this by setting a common transport layer for all the software inside the robot, from sensors and actuators to decision making. Around the common transport layer, there are several tools built to help developers introspect and diagnose their robots with ease. Gazebo is a simulator that calculates rigid-body dynamics, generates all kinds of sensor data, and allows user interaction through both a programming API and a powerful graphical interface. Some of the uses for Gazebo include robotics competitions, continuous integration, prototyping, machine learning and education.
In this talk, Louise will give an overview of ROS and Gazebo, the problems they've been solving so far and what's in the roadmap for the future, all while walking through a hello world robot example in simulation.
Bio:
Louise Poubel is a software engineer at Open Robotics working on free and open source tools for robotics, like the robot simulator Gazebo and the Robot Operating System (ROS). Louise first got involved with Open Robotics through GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women. Louise grew up in Brazil and went to college in Japan, where she received her BS in electromechanical engineering from Chiba University. She also holds a joint MEng in advanced robotics from École Centrale de Nantes and Warsaw University of Technology, where her research focused on real-time, whole-body human motion imitation by humanoid robots.
Control of Distributed Energy Resources: PDES and Hopfield Methods
Abstract
Renewable energy integration and resilience to disasters motivate the need for flexible resources in electric power systems. Distributed energy resources (DERs), such as electric vehicles and thermostatically controlled loads, represent an intriguing set of distributed assets to provide flexible services in power systems. This talk addresses modeling, estimation, and control for aggregations of DERs. Specifically, the talk is divided into two parts. First, we discuss a partial differential equation (PDE) approach to modeling and estimating aggregations of DERs. Second, we discuss a novel class of methods for controlling DER populations that are mathematically formulated as large-scale mixed integer programs. We call this class of methods "Hopfield Methods."
Bio
Scott Moura is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Director of eCAL. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 2011, the
M.S. degree from the University of Michigan in 2008, and the B.S. degree from the UC Berkeley, in 2006 - all in Mechanical Engineering. He was a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego in the Cymer Center for Control
Systems and Dynamics, and a visiting researcher in the Centre Automatique et Systèmes at MINES ParisTech in Paris, France. He is a recipient of the O. Hugo Shuck Best Paper Award, Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, Hellman Faculty Fellows Award, UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, University of Michigan Distinguished ProQuest Dissertation Honorable Mention, University of Michigan Rackham Merit Fellowship, and Distinguished
Leadership Award. His research interests include control & estimation theory for PDEs, optimization, machine learning, batteries, electric vehicles, and the distributed energy resources.
How to Hack a Power Grid
Abstract
The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled revolutionized people’s lifestyle by providing unconventional energy services, such as demand response programs, zero energy homes, and ultra-fast electric vehicle charging. Paired with these privileges are the unprecedented cyber-threats to the power grid, which could result in wide disruption, and in the worst case, large-scale blackouts.
Defending the electric power grid presents a dilemma. On one hand, the grid has one of the largest cyber-infrastructures. Therefore, it is practically impossible to build a bullet-free shell for the entire system. On the other hand, the grid is a dynamic system, wherein the continuity of operation is crucial. Thus, defense efforts need to be nearly real-time and accurate; slower or false detection would lead to physical system instability and incorrect market decisions.
In this talk, we will take the perspective of hackers, examining their goals, limitations, and the potential of launching successful attacks on the power grid.
Bio
Dr. J.K. (Jiankang) Wang is a principal investigator at The Ohio State University (OSU), where she leads the Power System Analysis Research Group. Her research interests include modeling and analyzing cyber-enabled electric power systems and electricity markets. Her recent research focuses on developing analytic and algorithmic tools for practical power system operation and planning, aiming to improve power grid cyber-security, operation reliability, and end-user experience. Her research lab activity collaborates with industry partners and governmental agencies.
Dr. Wang received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, where she minored in Management with a focus on electricity markets and venture capitalism. In 2014, she joined the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at OSU as an assistant professor. She also has a joint appointment from the department of Integrated Systems Engineering (ISE). Since July, 2018, she is appointed as the lead technical specialist by California ISO, where her responsibilities include examining the issues of electricity market manipulation, speculation and arbitrage.
Global asymptotic stabilization of spherical orientation by synergistic hybrid feedback with application to reduced attitude synchronization
Abstract
We develop a hybrid controller for global asymptotic stabilization on the n-dimensional sphere using synergistic potential functions. These consist of a collection of potential functions that induce a gradient descent controller during flows of the hybrid closed-loop system and a switching law that, at undesired equilibrium points of the gradient vector field, jumps to the lowest value among all the potential functions in the collection. We show that the proposed controller can be used for global reduced attitude synchronization, i.e., given a network of rigid-bodies, the proposed synergistic hybrid feedback can be used to globally synchronize a reference direction of each agent within a global but unknown inertial reference frame. We study this application for a network of three vehicles by means of simulation results.
Bio
Pedro Casau is a Research Assistant at the SCORE Lab of the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau. He received received the B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering in 2008 from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal. In 2010, he received the M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from IST and enrolled in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. program at the same institution which he completed with distinction and honours in 2016. While at IST, he participated on several national and international research projects on guidance, navigation and control of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and satellites. His current research interests include nonlinear control, hybrid control systems, vision-based control systems, controller design for autonomous air-vehicles.
Mechatronics Public Demo!
Watch robots compete in the Mechatronics Public Demo! Cheer on their sleep-deprived creators as they run their ‘bots through the field. Thrill to battles between autonomous robots navigating the field, dodging obstacles, and scoring points by shooting their ping pong ball ammo at the opponent robot! Come see this exciting SLUGNIFICANT SEVEN competition!
What: CMPE118 Mechatronics Public Demo
Where: UCSC Media Theater (M110)
When: Friday 7-Dec-2018, 6:15 - 8:30PM
The Mechatronics class is having their public demonstration of their final design project, SLUGNIFICANT SEVEN, Friday 7-Dec-2018 at 6:15 PM in the UCSC Media Theater (M110).
In this thrilling competition, teams from UCSC's Mechatronics course will pit their autonomous robots against each other in an epic SLUGNIFICANT SEVEN duel. Each robotic champion will begin back to back, then race to the initial firing zone at the other end of the field. From there, they can either destroy their opponent with ping pong ball ammo, or advance to a better firing position by hiding behind the obstacles. The champions will compete in a wild head to head tournament, until only one robot emerges victorious!
The public is invited (you might have to duck a few ping-pong balls) and the teams will be on hand to explain their designs to one and all. Come see what these students have accomplished in 10 weeks and cheer on the competition.
The flyer: https://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmpe118/Fall18/SlugnificantSeven_Invite.pdf
The project specs: https://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmpe118/Fall18/ProjectOverview_SlugnificantSeven.pdf
There will be a live webcast starting at 6PM:
www.twitch.tv/elkaim_ucsc (close up of the field)
www.twitch.tv/mdunneucsc (wide view of room)
Feel free to forward this to any and all that might be interested, children (future engineers) especially welcome.
