Lehigh’s Motee featured in int’l virtual conference on control, instrumentation and automation

sarah Jonas

4 years ago

Nader Motee

, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Lehigh University and a globally-recognized scholar in distributed control systems and real-time robot perception, will provide a technical keynote address to the 7th International Conference on Control, Instrumentation and Automation (

ICCIA 2020

). This academic event, hosted by the

University of Tabriz

in Tabriz, Iran, is incorporating virtual content this year due to complications brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and will take place Feb 23-24, 2021.

The goal of the 2-day conference is to develop and enhance the technical knowledge of its attendees and participants, and to foster the exchange of scientific findings and research results in the field of control engineering, instrumentation and automation. Topics to be covered include control systems analysis, design, and security, control engineering applications and education, industrial automation and instrumentation, robotics and mechatronics, applications of artificial intelligence, and more. The biennial ICCIA event occurs through the combined efforts of the

Iranian Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers

, the

Iranian section of the IEEE

, and the

International Conference on Control and Informatics Engineering

.

In his keynote, entitled “Time-Delay Origins of Fundamental Limits and Tradeoffs Between Risk of Large Fluctuations and Network Connectivity,” Motee will address topics related to consensus networks, with particular emphasis on applications related to autonomous vehicle platooning and synchronous power networks, and introduce notions of risk to assess robustness of such networks in presence of communication time-delay and external disturbances.

“I am proud that my group’s efforts are being honored in this way, and I am always happy when we have the opportunity to share what we discover in our research with the scientific community,” says Motee. “I also believe that it is important to build connections with researchers and practitioners who address similar issues to those my team encounters in our lab, and events like this provide a meaningful way of accomplishing this.”

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About Nader Motee

Motee leads the

Distributed Control and Dynamical Systems

team at Lehigh, who have recently taken up residence in the University’s brand-new Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (

AIR

) Laboratory. The AIR Lab, housed within the enormous research complex known as

Building C

on Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus, is essentially a 2,545-square-foot glass and aluminum box–a 3-story space enclosure outfitted with a high-frame-rate 360-degree camera system and high-speed data analysis technology–enables researchers to safely design and test a variety of robotics applications in a large three-dimensional space.

“In our work, we seek to close the gap between real-time sensing and taking autonomous actions in robots,”” explains Motee. “Humans do this easily and constantly. The question is: How do we make a robot understand the entire process very quickly, almost in real time?”

Motee is a professor in the

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics

at Lehigh University. Before joining the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Control and Dynamical Systems Department at California Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a PhD in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. His research interests include theoretical foundations of distributed control systems and optimization with applications to robot perception and networked robotics.

Motee has been recognized with the 2019 Best SIAM Journal on Optimization and Control Paper Prize,

ONR Young Investigator Award

(2016), NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2015), and AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2013). Motee is affiliated with Lehigh’s Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation (

I-DISC

) and Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (

I-CPIE

) and was the lead organizer of a NSF-funded workshop on Robot Learning Systems in October 2019.