About this event

The talk and its details are included below. All staff and researchers are welcome. Tea and coffee will be available from 1.30pm.  

Following on from the presentations Q&A, there will be a tour of the autonomous systems lab and its equipment, led by Matt Coombes, for all interested parties.  We look forward to seeing you there – note the next talk will be the 8^th August 

Control Engineering in Future Highly Automated Society

Prof Wen-Hua Chen, FIEEE CEng FIMechE FIET

EPSRC Established Career Fellow

Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Loughborough University

Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK.

W.Chen@lboro.ac.uk 

Abstract

Driven by the need of further increasing productivity and improving wellbeing and enabled by recent developments in AI and other digital technologies, we are moving into an era of highly automated society. Among others, autonomous driving, unmanned aviation, healthcare robots and automatic trading, are hot topics in media and daily discussion. Are we ready? Are they safe?

Control engineering plays the central role in our current automation. Will it still play a similar role in future high levels of automation, or be replaced by AI or other technologies?

This talk aims to trig more debates and discussion along these lines, particularly exploring the role of the control engineering in future automated economy. It argues feedback is fundamental to high levels of automation, and control theories are essential in understanding not only the interactions between key functions like perception and decision making/planning in robotics and autonomous systems, but also on their interactions with system behaviours and environment.  Examples are provided to illustrate undesirable behaviours caused by the coupling between optimisation and system dynamics, and interaction between perception and planning.  It argues that the current control theories could not provide effective analysis and design tools for future highly automated automation empowered by embedded AI functions and much more research is required.

 Bio

Dr Wen-Hua Chen holds Professor in Autonomous Vehicles in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University, UK. Prof. Chen has a considerable experience in control, signal processing and artificial intelligence and their applications in aerospace, automotive and agriculture systems. In the last 20 years, he has been working on the development and application of unmanned aircraft system and intelligent vehicle technologies, spanning autopilots, situational awareness, decision making, verification, remote sensing for precision agriculture and environment monitoring. He is a Chartered Engineer, and a Fellow of IEEE, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK. Recently Prof Chen was awarded a 5 years EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Established Career Fellowship in developing goal-oriented control systems for robotics and autonomous systems.