• Schedule at a glance
• Plenary Talks
• Invited Talks

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

PLENARY TALKS

Plenary Talk I: Time-Domain Passivity Control for Stable Haptic Enabled Systems
Prof. Blake Hannaford
Biorobotics Lab, University of Washington

Haptic interfaces and teleoperators which support kinesthetic feedback to the user share the property that they create a dynamical loop between user and environment. There is a growing group of interesting applications for haptics. Like classical control systems, this loop can be difficult to stabilize under all conditions. The problem is characterized by highly non-linear and non-linearizable dynamics (discontinuous hard contact with environments) and hard to model time varying components (human operator biomechanics and neuromotor properties). Previous approaches have achieved stability at a large cost in performance measured by haptic feedback perceptual quality.

Plenary Talk II: Human Adaptive Mechatronics
Fumio Harashima
Tokyo Denki University

Mechatronics is known as the discipline integrated by mechanical, electrical and information technology and has been used to produce advanced artifacts used in modern society, which has been developed through the interdisciplinary studies of diverse engineering fields. Our modern life is surrounded and enhanced by gadgets and gimmicks of mechatronics products, and those who use the products can get used to improve their operation skill. It is expected to develop mechatronics systems which are capable of adapting themselves to the level of the skill or dexterity of humans who use the systems. We need to found a new mechatronics discipline considering human in the closed loop. This may be named “Human adaptive mechatronics” and is a new discipline of the integration of mechanical, electrical, information technology and human sciences. Its application fields are found in diverse fields from smart human-machine interface for tele- surgery operation to rehabilitation assisting machines. In this presentation, recent activities on Human Adaptive Mechatronics are reviewed, and the future direction is discussed.

Plenary Talk III: H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 Video Coding for Next Generation Multimedia
K. R. Rao
University of Texas at Arlington

The video coding standards developed to date by ISO/IEC and ITU-T have not been able to address all the needs required by varying bit rates of different applications and at the same time meeting the quality requirements. An emerging video coding standard named H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 (International standard by end of 2003) aims at coding video sequences at approximately half the bit rate compared to MPEG-2 at the same quality. It also aims at having significant improvements in coding efficiency, error robustness and network friendliness. It makes use of better prediction methods for Intra (I), Predictive (P) and Bi-predictive (B) frames. Arbitrary Block-size Transform (ABT) is used which is a simplified transform that avoids the mismatch error (DCT/IDCT) observed in the motion compensation hybrid coding adopted in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. All these features along with others such as CABAC (Context Based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) have resulted in having a 2:1 coding gain over MPEG-2 at the cost of increase complexity. This emerging standard addresses various services/applications, transmission networks, enhanced efficiency, and diverse range of bit rates and spatial/temporal resolutions through profiles and layers. Parameter set concept, arbitrary slice ordering, flexible macroblock structure, redundant pictures, switched predictive and switched intra pictures have contributed to error resilience/robustness of this standard. Adaptive (directional) intra prediction, multiple reference pictures/frames for motion estimation and weighted motion compensated (MC), variable block-size MC, deblocking filter, hierarchical block transform etc., have contributed to the high coding efficiency of this standard developed jointly by the ITU-T Video coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the IS0/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). This combined group is called Joint Video Team (JVT)..Other parts of this standard such as file format, verification testing, reference software, conformance bit streams, standardizing example encoding description and potential extensions are being finalized soon. The seminar highlights the various functionalities of the encoder, points out the differences between this new standard and the existing standards and describes the state-of-the-art development by the industry. ftp and web sites related to standard documents, software, databases, conformance bit streams, meeting schedules, vendors, file formats, research groups, faq etc are provided. This standard opens up several research areas based on software/hardware implementations, improvements etc. The new standard addresses various applications such as video streaming over the internet, conversational services such as videophone/video conferencing over wired and wireless (mobile) networks, video-on-demand, near video-on-demand, multimedia messaging, pay-per-view, digital TV, HDTV, super HDTV, digital cinema, high quality video transmission over cable, cable modem, DSL, satellite and terrestrial channels, high density optical storage media such as DVD, digital cameras, camcorders and related consumer electronic products. This emerging standard enables multimedia services/systems viable, feasible, practical, affordable and user friendly. Through various network layers/protocols, profiles and levels this standard is designed to meet the ever increasing needs of current and emerging multimedia applications. The innovative and ingenious approach adopted in this multidimensional signal processing has led to 2:1 bit rate reduction while maintaining the same high visual quality as MPEG-2. Several start-ups as well as established/reputed multinational companies, research institutes etc have embarked on ambitious projects for developing/marketing consumer oriented products based on this standard. It is projected that this will be a multibillion dollar market within the next few years.

INVITED TALKS

Advanced Researches and Development in Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation in Thailand
Manukid Parnichkun
Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

Recently robots have attracted interests of Thai public very much. The number of students who go further their study in Engineering Schools in robotics field or related departments increases dramatically. These are resulted from series of success of Thai students who are able to conquer trophies from many international robot competitions. The speaker, however, will talk about advanced researches and development in Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation in Thailand, which is the other aspect perceived by the public.
Selected research and development projects in Thai universities will be highlighted in the presentation. The talk will cover Flying Robot Project, Underwater Robot Project, Humanoid Robot Project, Rocker-Bogie Field Mobile Robot Project, H-4 Family Parallel Manipulator Project, 6-DOF Haptic Device Project, Human-Machine Interface Project, Reconfigurable Multiple Mobile Robots System, and Medical Tele-Analyzer Project.
The speaker will talk about design concept, mechanism, hardware and software architecture, control algorithm, experiment/simulation result, evaluation, current status, and further plan of the selected projects. Some of the projects will be explained by video presentation.

Co-Evolution and Numerical Optimization
Min-Jea Tahk
Division of Aerospace Engineering
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Recently, several co-evolution algorithms have been developed for solving numerical optimization problems that are not easily solved by conventional evolutionary methods. Such examples are constrained parameter optimization, min-max problems, dynamic games, and non-cooperative games. These problems are common in that they can be treated as a two-player optimization problem. By using the co-evolution approach, the optimal strategy of both players can be found through the evolution process of two population groups. How a population group will evolve is completely dependent on the characteristics of the fitness measure. This fact implies that the key to successful problem solving is to find a suitable fitness measure for the given problem. In conventional evolution algorithms designed for numerical optimization, the fitness measure is simply determined by the value of the cost function or the performance index. However, the fitness of an individual in co-evolution is not easily defined since its fitness is dependent on which direction the opposing population is being evolved. In fact, two-player optimization problems may have different solutions, depending on the order of play. In this paper, various co-evolution methods developed by the author are summarized to demonstrate the usefulness of the co-evolution concept for numerical optimization. First, it is shown that the solution to a static game can be found by successively solving a series of matrix games where the next matrix game is defined through an evolution process. This idea is quite naïve and numerically not efficient. Nonetheless, by adopting the security strategy as the fitness measure of each group, the co-evolution method can solve various min-max problems without much difficulty. Next, constrained parameter optimization problems are treated as min-max problems and solved by co-evolution. This approach is based on the classical augmented Lagrangian method, a well-known nonlinear programming method, but the update of the parameter vector and the Lagrangian multiplier is done in parallel through a co-evolution process. This co-evolutionary augmented Lagrangian method has been shown quite efficient in solving many difficult constrained problems. A robust control problem with constraints is not formulated as a standard min-max problem, which is a zero-sum game, but as a static non-cooperative game, which is a nonzero-sum game. The concept of bi-matrix games is introduced for this class of problems, where the cost function of one player is not directly related with that of the opponent. It has been demonstrated that this approach is quite useful for practical control design problems, for which a number of modern control synthesis methods are not easily applied. Another potential of co-evolution for numerical optimization can be found in the analysis of dynamic games, which are quite difficult to solve, in general. Pursuit-evasion games without a prescribed final time is a quite important practical problem in this category. Evolution of three population groups is used to solve the optimal open-loop strategy of each player.

Dialectics in Control Theory
Michihiko Iida
Professor Emeritus, Tokai University

I. Introduction: Dialectics is the logic of the development in recognition. An era has a paradigm, called thesis in the dialectics. Realities demands a paradigm shift, called antithesis in dialectics, after the confliction of these two objects the third paradigm, called synthesis in dialectics, starts by synthesizing these conflicting objects. The synthesis becomes a new paradigm, which reduces to a new improved, or sublated, thesis and will begin a next dialectic cycle. It is the objective of the present paper to discuss a next paradigm in the control theory from the viewpoint of dialectics.
II. Evolution of Control Theory: The last three score years of the history of control theory has three paradigms in each score years; Classical Control Theory in 1940~1960, Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Optimal Control Theory in 1960~1980, and H8 Control Theory, after 1980. Control system design theory based on the frequency response method was the paradigm in the first period, to this thesis time domain optimal control theory in the second period recognized as an antithesis. After these conflicting theses, a synthesis of foregoing two paradigms by liberating the Hilbert space isomorphism in both the time and frequency domains becomes the last paradigm. The typical dialectic development can thus be seen in the evolution of control theory.
III. Control System Design Theory: Discussed in this section are the present state of the control system design theory, particularly of robust control theory as the primal importance in H8 control theory. It is recognized that, in general, the closer the mathematical description comes to decrease conservativeness in control performance, the more the computational complexity expands and the more the remaining difference between the theory and the real world stands out. To overcome these problems as well as to expand the control system design theory, a variety of control strategies are proposed by researchers, which are reviewed in the next section.
IV. Recent Research Attitude in Control Theory: The recent remarkable researches on the stochastic control and Quantum Mechanics in optimal control, among others, are introduced and the paradigm shifts, from continuous to hybrid and from deterministic to stochastic are discussed.
V. Conclusion: The next paradigm assumed by an antithesis to the present paradigm is proposed as the concluding remark.