Abstract: In this talk, popular neural network based controller design schemes for robot manipulators will be reviewed first. Robot manipulator dynamics models, especially the regressor formulation of robot manipulator dynamics, will be discussed and analyzed to introduce the analytic properties of the dynamics formulations that will enable the linearization of the non-linear robot manipulator dynamics in terms of a vector of the typically unknown robot dynamic parameters. Based on the regressor formulation of robot manipulator dynamics, a simple robot manipulator controller design scheme can be obtained using the Adaline network structure. Various comparison studies will be presented to show the pros and cons of model-based and non-model-based approaches to neural network based robot manipulators controller design schemes. The talk will feature computational and simulation techniques and examples. Conclusions and future challenges will be presented at the end of this talk.

 

Short Bio: Max Meng received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Victoria in 1992. He is currently a Professor of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on leave from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, where he is a Professor and the Director of the ART (Advanced Robotics & Teleoperation) Lab. His research expertise is in the areas of Robotics, Medical Robotics, Biomedical Engineering, Network Enabled Systems, Intelligent and Adaptive Systems, Human-Machine Interface, and their medical, industrial, and military applications. He has published over 160 journal and conference papers in his areas of expertise. Since 1992, Max has received some 15M research funding. Max has supervised 5 Ph.D. and 15 Master’s students to graduation. He is an editor of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, the Journal of Control and Intelligent Systems, the International Journal of Information Acquisition, and a Technical Editor of Advanced Robotics. He is the General Chair of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA 2001) held in Banff, and the General Chair of 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2005) to be held in Edmonton, Canada. Among his awards, he is a recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal award.