Event
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense: Tsung-Hsueh Lee
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
2:00 p.m.
Location: AVW 1146
Maria Hoo
301 405 3681
mch@umd.edu
ANNOUNCEMENT: Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Name: Tsung-Hsueh Lee
Committee:
Professor Pamela Abshire (Chair)
Professor Timothy Horiuchi
Professor Alireza Khaligh
Professor Robert Newcomb
Professor Elisabeth Smela
Professor Nikhil Chopra, Dean's Representative
Date/time: August 4, 2015, 2:00 PM
Location: AVW 1146
Title: ENABLING HARDWARE TECHNOLOGIES FOR AUTONOMY IN TINY ROBOTS: CONTROL, COMPUTATION, FABRICATION
Abstract:
Advances in tiny robots (from a few cm cubic in volume to much less than one cm cubic) have brought great excitement. Although individually limited, a large group of these robots has the potential to work cooperatively and accomplish complex tasks. The best examples in the nature are ant and bee colonies. They are suitable for applications like search and rescue, military scouting, infrastructure and equipment monitoring, nano-manufacture, and possibly medicine. In the near future, tiny robots are expected to redefine some existing applications and broaden many others.
Most of these applications require a high level of autonomy that has been demonstrated by large robotic platforms, like iRobot, Honda ASIMO, HRP-3, and Sony AIBO. However, when robot size shrinks down, current approaches are no longer valid to achieve the necessary functions. This work has focused on the electronics and fabrication problems. We addresses three major technical hurdles caused by using current approaches: 1) difficulty of compact integration; 2) need for real-time and power-efficient computations; 3) unavailability of commercial tiny actuators and mechanisms. The aim of this work is to provide enabling hardware technologies to achieve autonomy.
We propose a decentralized application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) platform where each component is responsible for its own operation and autonomy to the greatest extent possible. The platform consists of electronics modules for the fundamental functions required to fulfill the desired autonomy: actuation, control, power supply, and sensing. Central processing may be needed for coordination. The actuators will be post-fabricated on the ASIC directly. This design makes for a scalable and modular architecture.
Many of the necessary components have been shown to work in physical implementations or simulations: 1) tunable motion controller for very low frequency actuation; 2) nonvolatile memory and programming method to achieve automatic and one-time programming; 3) high-voltage circuit with the highest reported breakdown voltage in standard 0.5 μm CMOS; 4) computational architecture for low power search and optimization of control space used for motion planning; 5) thermal actuators fabricated using CMOS compatible process. These contributions will be generally enabling for many other kinds of systems with strict size and power constraints.
