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PResident’s message
Control Ambassadors
I
t is not often that the future of control is discussed in the mainstream media, but it occurred in a column in the March 17, 2014 issue of Barron’s Technology Week [1]. The author, impressed with the advances in sensor technology displayed at the 2014 South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas, concludes the article with conjectures about future smart control devices that new sensors will enable. I was reminded of this article by conversations at the American Control Conference (ACC) in Portland, Oregon. Many types of sensors are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. An apt example is the typical smartphone, which contains an inertial measurement unit, a camera, a computer, satellite navigation, and communications devices sufficient to navigate and control autonomous vehicles. Sensor-stabilized quadrotors rapidly went from the research laboratory to commercially available toys. Vision-based intelligent cruise control and lane departure warning, enabled by cheap cameras, are now commercially available. The Barron’s column follows the ubiquitous sensor theme of [2] but neglects the huge advances that have occurred in computational hardware and algorithms; the speed, ubiquity, and reliability of communications; and advances in control and online data processing that have occurred in the last decades. Together, these advances enable a new era of control applications, including to large-scale, geographically distributed, dynamic systems. Discussions after the ACC special sessions identified some
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2014.2333212 Date of publication: 16 September 2014
The IEEE Control Systems Society Executive Committee and publication editors.
of the missing theoretical and practical tools needed to automatically organize and extract the essential information from the huge quantities of data and manipulate the many control variables effectively, reliably, and automatically. Cyberphysical systems research has actively considered related issues for such applications as the smart grid and smart cities, but many of the potential
applications may be beyond our current imaginations. Sensing and communication ubiquity are affecting observability and controllability in fundamental ways for applications where performance is currently limited either by lack of distributed sensing or actuation. How will cell phones, as ubiquitous mobile traffic sensors, alter the field of transportation flow control?
Maria Prandini, Elisabetta Astolfi, Elena Valcher, Kirsten Morris, and Anuradha Annaswamy.
12 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » october 2014
Privacy concerns may limit the use of such data for ramp metering; however, the accumulated data is already providing drivers with the travel time distribution data necessary for (manual) real-time route planning. What will ultimately emerge in the areas of smart grids and smart cities? On a smaller scale, but with similar issues, if a battery stack is modeled as a spatially separated array of chemical reaction cells, each with slightly different chemical compositions, what are the sensor and actuator requirements for the effective battery management systems required for electrified transportation and smart-grid energy storage? In addition to sound control-theoretic research, effective contributions in such application domains require investigators to become control ambassadors. These people are willing to invest sufficient time to learn the fundamental domain knowledge in these application areas, just as we desire the professionals in such applications to learn the
fundamentals behind control design and analysis.
Impact of Control The second edition of the “Impact of Control Technology” report provides several interesting examples of increasingly capable control systems enabled by growing computational, communication, algorithmic, and analysis capa- Thomas Parisini and Ed Chong finding their way to the IEEE Control Systems Society Executive Committee bilities [3]. While most users are meeting. unaware that mobile phones contain controllers, in fact they contain constraints—is expanding its realm of several. For example, base stations and impact. The report documents awardmobile phones cooperate over their net- winning applications in the cement and work to control transmission power by all ethylene industries. This column allows space for only units in a cell. The Kiva system includes learning and adaptation, world mod- these very few highlights. Please see els, coordination through a hierarchical the second edition of the report for full scheme, and novel robotic vehicles to details on approximately 60 different achieve warehouse automation [4]. Model applications [3]. predictive control—even with nonlinear models, Boolean variables, and logical (continued on p. 98)
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Find out more about Quanser’s platform for control systems research validation at www.quanser.com/csm october 2014 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 13
[7] L. Gomes and S. Bogosyan, “Current trends in remote laboratories,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 56, no. 12, pp. 4744–4756, 2009. [8] L. Cui, F. P. Tso, D. Yao, and W. Jia, “WeFiLab: A web-based WiFi laboratory platform for wireless networking education,” IEEE Trans. Learn. Technol., vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 291–303, 2012. [9] J. Apkarian and A. Dawes, “Interactive control education with virtual presence on the Web,” in Proc. American Control Conf., Chicago, IL, 2000, pp. 3985–3990. [10] V. Kapila. (1999). Laboratory experiment manual for control laboratory. Polytech. Univ., Brooklyn, NY. [Online]. Available: http://mechatronics. poly.edu/Control_Lab/manual.pdf [11] V. Kapila, M. S. de Queiroz, and A. Tzes, “A multidisciplinary undergraduate real-time experimental control laboratory,” in Proc. American Control Conf., Chicago, IL, 2000, pp. 3980–3984. [12] C. Dubey, H. Wong, V. Kapila, and P. Kumar, “Web-enabled remote control laboratory using an embedded Ethernet microcontroller,” in Internet Accessible Remote Laboratories: Scalable E-learning Tools for Engineering and Science Disciplines, A. K. M. Azad, M. E. Auer, and V. J. Harward, Eds. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2011, pp. 338–361. [13] T. Igoe, Making Things Talk. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007. [14] B. Kuo, Automatic Control Systems, 7th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995, pp. 188–189. [15] R. Sims, “Interactivity: A forgotten art?” Comput. Human Behav., vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 157–180, 1997. [16] N. E. Cagiltay, E. Aydin, C. C. Aydin, A. Kara, and M. Alexandru, “Seven principles of instructional content design for a remote laboratory: A case study on ERRL,” IEEE Trans. Educ., vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 320–327, 2011.
[17] J. Liu, S. Hu, J. J. Thiagarajan, X. Zhang, S. Ranganath, M. K. Banavar, and A. Spanias, “Interactive DSP laboratories on mobile phones and tablets,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustics, Speech Signal Processing, 2012, pp. 2761–2764. [18] G.-J. Hwang, P.-H. Wu, and H.-R. Ke, “An interactive concept map approach to supporting mobile learning activities for natural science courses,” Comput. Educ., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 2272–2280, 2011. [19] J. Nielsen, Usability Engineering, 1st ed. Boston, MA: Academic Press, 1993. [20] P. Orduña, J. García-Zubia, J. Irurzun, D. López-de-Ipiña, and L. Rodriguez-Gil, “Enabling mobile access to remote laboratories,” in Proc. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conf., 2011, pp. 312–318. [21] (2014, Jan.). The state of mobile apps. Nielsen Co. New York. [Online]. Available: http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2010-Reports/Nielsen-State-of-Mobile-Apps-Whitepaper.pdf [22] D. Mark and J. LaMarche, Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2009. [23] J. A. Frank, “Multimodal mobile apps for intuitive human-machine interaction,” M.S. thesis, Dept. Mechanical Aerospace Eng., Polytech. Inst. NYU, Brooklyn, NY, 2013. [24] J. Sauro and J. R. Lewis, Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2012. [25] W. Albert and T. Tullis, Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, 2nd ed. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2013.
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PResident’s message
News A related information item is that the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Board of Governors approved a new Technical Committee on Smart Cities at its June 2014 meeting. Raja Sengupta is the founding chair.
Trivia Conversations with fellow members of the CSS Executive Committee (ExComm) provided me with the answers to the following two trivia questions. »» Who has hoboed their way, via train, across the United States? »» Who had an early career as a professional magician?
(continued from p. 13)
These two individuals are both current members of ExComm. If you think you know the answers, I will be happy to confirm or deny.
Closing Ideally, enhanced sensing, actuation, communication, and computational capabilities enable increasing utilization of control theory research results, improving performance and reliability, giving rise to new realms of control applications, and motivating new directions of control research. The potential applications keep the value and impact of control theory research in the minds of funding agencies.
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I hope to see you at the IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control (MSC) in Antibes this month. I can be reached in person at the MSC or by e-mail anytime at
[email protected].
References [1] T. Ray, “Finally, sensors get personal,” Barron’s Technol. Week, p. 31, Mar. 15, 2014. [2] P. Saffo. (1997). Sensors: The next wave of infotech innovation. [Online]. Available: http:// w w w.saffo.com/essays/sen sors-t he-nextwave-of-infotech-innovation/ [3] T. Samad and A. M. Annaswamy, Eds. (2014). “The impact of control technology,” 2nd ed. IEEE Control Systems Society. [Online]. Available: http://www.ieeecss.org [4] Kiva Systems LLC. North Reading, MA. [Online]. Available: http://www.kivasystems.com/
Jay A. Farrell
