Lastest News
Below is a listing of the latest news announcements, organized chronologically, with respect to the research and teaching activities of Prof. R.A. de Callafon. The latest news items are also updated in the ticker box on the home page. Please come back regularly for an update!
Tony Hawk and the Physics of Skateboarding
March 2012
As part of the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering,
physics and dynamics behind skateboarding was demonstrated to high school students at the Carmel Valley
Recreation Center. We were fortunate that Tony Hawk and his crew came to help us out,
while Paul Schmitt demonstrated the art behind building skateboads with
CreateaSkate.org. With the help of some talented
undergraduate students at UCSD we were able to demonstrate the main principle behind "pumping",
allowing their intial skateboard robot design to move up and down a half-pipe.
Research with Solar Turbines
January 2011
Funded by Solar Turbines Inc., Chad Holcomb is a new student supervised by Prof. de Callafon and Prof. Bitmead.
Chad will be working on aspects related to dynamic modeling and control of turbine machinery. Happy
New Year!
Full Professor
July 2011
The "Associate" can now be dropped and moved on to the more colorful position of a Full Professor.
While in France, that needed to be celebrated in style with a small visit to
Chateau de Calavon located in Lambesc,
close to Aix-en-Provance. Dating back several hundred years and believed to be one of the earliest
wineries of the de Calavon family, now owened by the family Audibert.
Sabbatical Leave
June 2011
During the month of June, 2011, Prof. de Callafon made an extended visit to the the GIPSA lab in Grenoble, France working on adaptive feedback regulation problems
with application to vibration control with Prof. Landau and his students Tudor-Bogdan Airimitoaie and Marouane Alma. Based on the earlier work developed
under REACT (Robust Estimation for Automatic Controller
Tuning), the sabatical leave at the Laboratoire d'Automatique was used to develop an extended
version of REACT that also allows for weighting the (variance) of the control signal during
regulation.
In addition, the time was used to develop the real-time software that allowed the
algorithm to be implemented on the experimental mechanical setup of the Control Active Robust des Vibrations
(CARV) to validate the adaptive regulation capabilities of REACT. The develppment of this theory
and the succesful application is developed into a new publication.
San Diego Science Festival
March 27, 2010
The San Diego Science Festival (SDSF) 2010 Expo Day AT PETCO park brought together over 150 hands-on science activities and 12 stage performances for
kids. One of the goals of the EXPO is to inspire San Diego's youth to pursue science-oriented education and
careers. Our exhibit promoted COSMOS and in particular
our cluster on Engineering Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures.
Many kids visited our exhibit and it was a huge success. A big thanks to Myles and Tommy helping set up our exhibit!
It gave us an opportunity to communicate our excitement for engineering and science to the
public. For more info, see also the article This Week @ UCSD or its PDF archive.
Seminar at Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
February 9, 2010
Following an invitation of Prof. Lucy Pao,
a seminar on REACT will be given at the Dept. of Electrical, Computer and Energy
Engineering (ECEE), University of Colorado at Boulder. More details can also be found in the posted on-line flyer.
COSMOS in the SERVO magazine
January 31, 2010
The SERVO magazine issue of January 2010, page 71-76 features an article
on our COSMOS cluster on Engineering Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures.
In the article entitled "The Education of Budding
Robotics" Bryce and Evan Woolley give an overview of the
experience of the students during our four week COSMOS residential
program. A copy in (low res. PDF) can be downloaded here and a great opportunity to learn more about our cluster. (Reprinted with permission from T&L Publications, Inc.)
New website up and running
January 4, 2010Our new website is finally up and running. It contains updated information on the research, teaching and publications of Prof. de Callafon. Happy New Year and the best wished for 2010!
Updated list of publications
November 30, 2009List of Publications has been updated till 2010. This was long overdue and we are happy that we now have a full list of publications available on this website. We are currently working on including BibTeX entries to further simply the process of including a reference to our work :)
NSF CDI award - Swarms of Ocean Robots
November 10, 2009
A joint effort between Jorge
Cortes (PI) at the Dept. of MAE at UCSD, Ilkay Altintas at the
SDSC at UCSD, Peter Franks at
SIO, Jules Jaffe at SIO
and Raymond de Callafon at the Dept. of MAE at UCSD has led to
funding of an NSF CDI award on Distributed Ocean Monitoring using coordinated and buoyancy controlled
drogues. See also the JSOE press release or the
CBS 8, San Diego news
story.
New book on Realtime Controller Tuning
August 30, 2009
A new book on Realtime Controller Tuning for Periodic Disturbance Rejection and
authored by Charles Kinney and R.A. de Callafon is now available.
It can be purchased from Amazon and
show how feedback controllers can be adopted in real-time to
disturbance dynamics present during the feedback. A specific
application for which this is useful is Active Noise Control where
sound spectra or periodic sound components change over time.
15th IFAC Symposium on System Identification
July 30, 2009
The SYSID'09 symposium in Saint-Malo, France was a success and a
great opportunity to catch up with collegues and friends. Rubbing
elbows with the many System Identification experts at the
conference, Dennis Bernstein was able to capture of picture of
Paul van den Hof, Raymond de Callafon, Johan Schoukens and
Bo Wahlberg at one of the many wine/french cheese
receptions held during the conference.