Keynote Speakers

Using the opportunities provided by additive manufacture, advanced high performance electrohydraulic actuators are emerging which exhibit tightly-integrated sensing, control and power stages. Not only do these provide excellent power density and dynamic response, but the potential for robust control and health monitoring built on their embedded sensing capability. In this talk, I will review the pros and cons of traditional hydraulic actuation and discuss concepts for improved performance. A key challenge is the poor energy efficiency of hydraulic actuators controlled by throttling valves, but this can be overcome by using servomotor driven pumps (as in Electrohydrostatic Actuators, EHAs), or digital hydraulic architectures such as those using high-speed switching valves. Whichever architecture is used, merging the separate parts into one structural unit gives enormous benefits in terms of compactness, reliability, reduced part count, and improved dynamic performance. Additive manufacture (AM) is the key to this integration, as it allows hydraulic components with complex internal galleries to be made without the constrains of line-of-sight machining, and dramatically reduces weight and material waste. Critically, AM also promises a much shorter development cycle. I will present examples of AM hydromechatronic actuators designed for aerospace, and also for robotic and medical applications (prostheses) where the new approach has generated smaller scale devices than are normally associated with hydraulics.

Wafer scanners are complex lithography machines that are critical to the production of integrated circuits. Driven by improved performance in terms of throughput, overlay, and imaging, the control design of wafer scanners is part of its success. Inherent design limitations like the waterbed effect, however, pose constraints on the ever-increasing demand for improved control specifications and as such provide the motivation to explore nonlinear strategies. For the fast positioning stages of a wafer scanner a typical example is given by the recent developments in hybrid integrator-gain systems (HIGS). Such systems operate alternately in integrator mode or in gain mode as to exploit phase benefits. Unlike, for example, reset control approaches with (partial) state resets, HIGS does not produce discontinuous control signals. This is particularly useful when dealing with weakly damped resonances of the wafer scanner. In the plenary lecture, an industrial nonlinear control perspective will be discussed that includes the ability to surpass inherent design limitations as well as the recent developments in time- and frequency-domain stability tools, robust nonlinear control design/considerations, and demonstrations together with the encountered pitfalls the come along when bringing nonlinear motion control to practice.

This talk discusses the concept of cyber-physical engineering (CPE) for the study and design of flexible automation systems composed of smart autonomous cyber-physical components (CPC). In such systems, flexibility and adaptivity is achieved on account of autonomy of the CPCs collaboratively exhibiting emergent behaviour in response for various disturbances in various domains: physical, cyber, societal and market. Wireless communication is just one of the factors complicating assurance of dependable behaviour of such mechatronic swarms, therefore new engineering methods are required. The principle of cyber-physical engineering, discussed in this talk, assumes the use of languages and tools for interdisciplinary modelling at all stages of systems’ design, analysis and operation.