Perfect Storm—Time to Rethink the Future of

Control Research and Education? 

 

Abstract:

Automatic Control is a relatively new field in Mechanical Engineering. It is time to have a serious discussion about the future of “Controls”, in terms of how we define and teach its core knowledge and how we best apply

what we know to solve impactful research problems.

There are several external factors that seem to impact our field of discipline at this very moment. One is the rapid rising of “data-driven” and “computation-driven” tools and methods, including deep-neural-network and reinforcement learning. These methods are quite different from the traditional dynamic modeling, and subsequent “model-based” analysis and synthesis methodologies that dominate what we teach in undergraduate and graduate control courses.

Another mega-trend is that many “grand challenge” problems emerge and need to be solved quickly, including climate change, clean energy, etc. Due to the urgency and multi-disciplinary nature of these problems, the cry

for “problem-centric” research vs. “domain-centric” research is stronger and government funding seems to be shifting very quickly. We need to think carefully how to best-preparing our students to be ready to take on these grand challenges. The evolution of my research areas and some preliminary experience and thoughts will be presented in this talk.

 

Biography:

Huei Peng received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He is now a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He currently

serves as the Director of Mcity, which studies connected and autonomous vehicle technologies and promotes their deployment. His research interests include adaptive control and optimal control, with emphasis on their applications to vehicular and transportation systems. His current research focuses include design and control of electrified vehicles, and connected/automated vehicles.

In the last 10 years, he was involved in the design of several military and civilian concept vehicles, including FTTS, FMTV, Eaton/Fedex, and Super-HUMMWV—for both electric and hydraulic hybrid concepts. He served as the US Director of the DOE sponsored Clean Energy Research Center—Clean Vehicle Consortium, which supports more than 30 research projects related to the development of clean vehicles.

He has served as the PI or co-PI of more than 60 research projects, with a total funding of more than 60 million dollars. He has more than 300 technical publications, including 150 in referred journals and transactions and four books. His h-index is 82 according to the Google scholar analysis. The total number of citations to his work is more than 26,000. He believes in setting high expectation and helping students to exceed it by selecting innovative research topics with high impact. One of his proudest achievements is that more than half of his Ph.D. students have each published at least one paper cited more than 100 times. Huei Peng has been an active member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is both an SAE fellow and an ASME Fellow.