~~Speaker: Dror Freirich
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Emilia Fridman

Wednesday, January 27th, 2016 at 15:30
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Decentralized Networked Control of Large-Scale Systems

Abstract

Networked control systems, where the plant is controlled via communication network, became a hot topic. Compared with traditional feedback control systems, where the components are usually connected via point-to-point cables, the introduction of communication network media brings great advantages. It is also common place in industry that the total plant to be controlled consists of a large number of interacting subsystems. Usually the control of the plant is designed in a decentralized manner with local control stations allocated to individual subsystems.
     
A time-delay approach to both, continuous and discrete-time, large-scale networked control systems is presented. The local networks operate asynchronously and independently of each other in the presence of variable sampling intervals, transmission delays and scheduling protocols (from sensors to controllers). A Lyapunov-Krasovskii method is presented in order to formulate efficient LMI conditions for the exponential stability of the closed-loop large-scale system. The presented method essentially improves the existing results, and allows, for the first time, large communication delays.

~~Speaker: Haim Simkovits, 
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Weiss

Wednesday, January 20, 2016 at 15:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Navigation Methods by Inertial Device and Signals of Opportunity

Abstract

Inertial navigation systems are known to yield rather accurate measurements over short time intervals, while their error variance tends to increase with time. In order to keep the error within specification, most systems use GPS signals. In the absence of GPS data, due to jamming or spoofing, it is desirable to use signals-of-opportunity instead.
In the present work, we examine an alternative fixing approach for navigation based on signals-of-opportunity generated by multiple, stationary emitters with known position. A moving sensor intercepts signals-of-opportunity in different locations along its trajectory. The structure of the transmitted signals is utilized for synchronization between measurements in different locations and different times. Nowadays, most radars and digital communications emitters use signals with predefined structure that are appropriate for the proposed method.
Since the maximum likelihood location estimate requires computational resources that are not always available in small inexpensive platforms, we propose a computationally efficient semi-definite relaxation algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms converge to the Cramer-Rao lower bound under some geometrical and noise limitations.

Biological Controls of Intracellular Mineralization Processes –

Materials Science in vivo

Dr.  Assaf  Gal

Department of Biomaterials, Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces

Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam, Germany