The workshop consists of 9 presenters from the leading research groups in the relevant fields of the above workshop title in North American [Canada (4) and USA (2)] and Europe [France (1) and UK (2)], where 6 presenters are from academia, 1 presenter is from national research laboratory, and 2 presenters are from industry.

- Youmin Zhang (Concordia University) - brief CV

 

Brief biographies of Presenters:

Youmin ZHANG is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the Concordia Institute of Aerospace Design and Innovation (CIADI) at Concordia University, Canada. His main research interests and experience are in the areas of condition monitoring, fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant (flight) control systems; cooperative guidance, navigation and control of unmanned aerial/ground vehicles; dynamic systems modeling, estimation, identification and control; and advanced signal processing techniques for diagnosis, prognosis and health management of safety-critical systems and manufacturing processes. He has published 4 books, over 200 journal and conference papers. He is a senior member of AIAA, senior member of IEEE, a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety for Technical Processes, and a member of the AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Program Committee (PC) on Unmanned Systems. He is an Editorial Board Member of several international journals and IPC member of many international conferences.

Camille-Alain RABBATH holds an adjunct professorship position at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His current research interests are in real-time control and distributed modeling and simulations, nonlinear sampled-data control, guidance, and multi-vehicle cooperative decision and control. He is Associate Editor for the journals IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Transactions of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, and Control Engineering Practice. He is co-author of the book "Safety and Reliability in Cooperating Unmanned Aerial Systems". He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of AIAA and OIQ.

YangQuan CHEN received the B.S. degree in industrial automation from the University of Science and Technology of Beijing, Beijing, China, in 1985, the M.S. degree in automatic control from the Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree in advanced control and instrumentation from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore, in 1998. He is currently an Associate Professor of electrical engineering at Utah State University, Logan, and the Director of the Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems.

Christopher EDWARDS is a Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Leicester. He graduated from Warwick University in 1987 with first class honor in Mathematics and was appointed as a Lecturer in Control Engineering at Leicester in 1996, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004, Reader in 2008 and awarded a personal chair in 2010. He has an international reputation for his work on advanced fault-tolerant control, with particular application to aerospace systems. He is the author of over 240 refereed papers, 14 chapter contributions to edited monographs and three books: "Sliding mode control: theory and applications" (1998), "Fault tolerant flight control: a benchmark challenge" (2010), and "Fault detection and fault tolerant control using sliding modes" (2011).

Cameron FULFORD received his B.A.Sc. degree with honours in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2005 and his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering with the Systems Control Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2007. His research studies included nonlinear control and system identification of a 5-DOF magnetically levitated positioning device. He is currently the Engineering Manager of the Systems and Control Group at Quanser Consulting Inc. in Markham, Ontario, Canada. Cameron is the lead engineer for the development of Quanser’s Unmanned Vehicle Systems Lab and related technologies. Cameron’s interests include the development of educational unmanned vehicle platforms, multi-vehicle control, sensor integration, and the development of rapid controls prototyping hardware and software.

Hugh H.T. LIU Hugh H.T. Liu is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), Toronto, Canada, where he also serves as the Associate Director, Graduate Studies. His research work over the past several years has included a number of aircraft systems and control related areas, and he leads the Flight Systems and Contro (FSC) Research Laboratory. Dr. Liu is an internationally leading researcher in the area of aircraft systems and control. He has published over 100 technical papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has received one US/Canada patent of his work on motion synchronization. Dr. Liu has made significant research contributions in autonomous unmanned systems development, cooperative control, and integrated modeling and simulation. He also serves on editorial boards and technical committees of international professional societies. Before his academic appointment, Dr. Liu has several years’ industrial experience where he participated and led development projects of aircraft environmental control systems. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering of the University of Toronto in 1998. He is an active member of IEEE, AIAA, CASI, and Fellow of CSME. Dr. Liu is also a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario.

Liang TANG is an Intelligent Control and Prediction Lead at Impact Technologies. Dr. Tang’s career has been focused on the development of health management and intelligent control solutions for a wide range of military and commercial systems. His recent work has also involved developing data fusion, tracking and navigation technologies for various unmanned autonomous platforms. He is currently the Principal Investigator of multiple NASA and DoD SBIR/STTR programs developing fault tolerant control strategies for advanced autonomous system, GPS-independent inertial navigation device for UAV and USV, fault diagnostic algorithms for jet engine and distributed data fusion system for USVs. He received his Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, where his research focused on nonlinear system identification and controls with applications to robotics and power systems. Before he joined Impact Technologies, he was a research fellow with the School of ECE, Georgia Institute of Technology, where he conducted research on fault diagnosis and controls of UAVs. He has published more than 50 papers in his areas of expertise.

Didier THEILLIOL received the Ph.D. degree in Control Engineering from University of Lorraine (France) in 1993. Since September 2004, he is a full Professor in Research Center of Automatic Control of Nancy at University of Lorraine where he co-ordinates and leads national, European and international R&D projects in steel industries, wastewater treatment plant, or aerospace domain. His current research interests include model-based fault diagnosis (FDI) method synthesis and active fault-tolerant control (FTC) system design for LTI, LPV, Multi-linear systems and also reliability analysis. He published over 120 journal/conference papers and is co-author of a new book untitled "Fault-tolerant Control Systems: Design and Practical Applications" (Springer 2009). Didier Theilliol is a member of the Editorial Board of ISA Transactions and Steering Committee of European Advanced Control and Diagnosis working group.

Antonios TSOURDOS is a Professor and Head of the Centre for Autonomous Systems at Cranfield University, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. He was member of the Team Stellar, the winning team for the UK MoD Grand Challenge (2008) and the IET Innovation Award (Category Team, 2009). Antonios is an editorial board member of the Proceedings of the IMechE Part G Journal of Aerospace Engineering, the International Journal of Systems Science, the IEEE Transactions of Instrumentation and Measurement, the International Journal on Advances in Intelligent Systems, the Journal of Mathematics in Engineering, Science and Aerospace (MESA) and the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences. Professor Tsourdos is a member of the Expert Advisory Group on Precision, Navigation and Networking for the Complex Weapons Centre of Defence Technology, a member of the A|D|S Autonomous Systems Strategy Group and the ADD KTN National Technical Committee on Autonomous Systems. Professor Tsourdos is also a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Aerospace Control, the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems, the AIAA Technical Committee on Guidance, Control & Navigation (AIAA GNC TC), The AIAA Unmanned Systems Programme Committee, the IEEE Control System Society Technical Committee on Aerospace Control (TCAC) and the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Professor Tsourdos is also member of IET Robotics & Mechatronics Executive Team. He is co-author of the book "Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" and over 100 conference and journal papers.