Keynote Speakers

In this talk, I will discuss how we can achieve truly autonomous robots that can explore the vast ocean space.

Our research started with our curiosity about terrestrial snakes and the corresponding snake robots, which led to a new class of marine robots. We leveraged nonlinear control theory to analyze and understand, and thus to design and control, efficient robots for autonomous marine operations. I will discuss the motivation and foundations of our research on snake robots and how this led to a new class of marine robots in the subsea industry.

Moreover, I will present recent results demonstrating how this new class of marine robots may hold the key to achieving energy autonomy, the holy grail of the marine robotics community.

The building sector consumes currently more than 40 % of global resources and energy. Projecting the demand of buildings according to the increasing world population lead to significant resource problems in the near future. Therefore, increasing efficiency and reducing resources in the building sector is a crucial task. Adaptivity of the load bearing structures as well as the façade elements offers a high potential to reduce grey energy due to ultra light-weight load bearing structures respectively new ideas concerning energy reduced building elements and comfort oriented climate control. In the talk a systems engineering view on the specific problems in adaptive buildings is given. At first adaptive elements in the truss structure of a building a discussed. 

Starting from modeling, the problem of sensor and actuator placement is presented. For the control system of the active load bearing a complete model-based tool chain for state estimation, disturbance compensation, fault diagnosis, static compensation, and control reconfiguration was developed. The results are demonstrated in a 36 m high rise multi- storey building on the campus of University of Stuttgart. In the second part of the talk new adaptive façade elements are presented. Hydroskin is a textile façade system, which can store rain water, and can be used for evaporation for cooling inside and outside areas. 

Coolskin is a new zeolite based adsorption machine system, integrated partly in the façade system. A new idea of a lime storage system for heating the building and as an energy storage is introduced. These diverse systems need an comprehensive coordination and control of all subsystems.

This lecture will present the story of the MegaVanderTest, a test involving 100 self-driving vehicles, which ran the week of Nov. 18, 2022 on I24 in Nashville, TN. The MegaVanderTest is the test which achieved the largest concentration of self-driving vehicles collaboratively controlling traffic on a single stretch of freeway in the history of self-driving vehicles.  The talk will first cover the architecture built and deployed by the CIRCLES team. It will present some of the algorithms populating the planning layer of the system, mostly based on optimal control and imitation learning of Kernel-based expert controllers. It will also present some of the algorithms populating the local control regulation layer, based on deep-reinforcement learning and MPC. Finally it will present the way the algorithms had to run in the field, due to the fact that most modern ACC architectures.