4:00 What’s a control system and why do I care? (Danny Abramovitch, Agilent)

4:30 Lithium Battery Tech (and How We Use Feedback to Improve It) (Richard Braatz, MIT)

4:45 Drone’s to the Rescue! (Kam Leang, University of Utah)

5:00 Discussion w/ UH Team About UH/Hawaii Specific Interests/Sensitivities

Self-driving cars, delivery drones, temperature control, wind turbines, bioreactors for medicine production, artificial limbs, and robots used in manufacturing and cleaning floors all rely on one hidden technology:  human-built feedback. (Brief video intro at: https://youtu.be/JjgprBOviuw.)

Feedback as a phenomenon is everywhere: in our actions, in our bodies, and in the natural world around us.  The cycle of “measure, compute, decide, adjust, and repeat” is fundamental to everything we do and everything we learn.  Humans use their senses and brains to adjust their actions based on feedback. When people help other people learn to better use feedback, it is called coaching.  When humans try to teach machines how to use feedback in an autonomous way, that’s where we come in.

The way we teach a machine how to move safely around the world and interact with humans, to cook rice automatically, or control the room temperature is through software.  In many ways this software is far simpler than a search engine or video game, but it has some extra constraints and stringent requirements made necessary by interacting with and adjusting the real world.  Our software has to get good measurements from sensors, compare those to our desired readings, decide what to do about any errors, and then take action to adjust things for the better.  

From an engineering perspective, feedback and sensitivity to timing are a fundamental difference between the filtering perspective on the left and the feedback perspective on the right.  Namely our actions have to be in the “Goldilocks” zone of not too much and not too little, and they have to be done on time (not too late).  In other words, we need to apply the right feedback principles to guide us in writing the proper code.

We will start by introducing what is unique about automatic feedback control compared to other computer run engineering systems.  This will be a bridge between research interests of the UH team, Hawaii centric issues of climate and sustainability, and what feedback brings to the problem. We will then discuss some specific examples of the application of feedback control research to modern day, real-world problems.  Finally, we hope to have an open discussion about how these might apply specifically to Hawaii.