Feedback Control in Transportation Applications

Pushkin Kachroo
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Friday, June 5, 2009 at 2:00pm
Engr IV Room 57-124

Abstract
The talk will present feedback control problems that are encountered in microscopic and macroscopic traffic control. Microscopic traffic deals with vehicle level formulations, whereas macroscopic traffic deals with traffic as an aggregate level. The modeling of microscopic problems is primarily performed using lumped parameter methods, while that of macroscopic problems is performed using distributed parameter methods. The talk will discuss traction control for vehicle control applications especially discussed in the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and will also cover one and two dimensional traffic control problems for vehicular and pedestrian traffic problems.

Biography
Pushkin Kachroo (SM '00) received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering 1993, his M.S. from Rice University in Mechanical Engineering in 1990, and his B.Tech. from I.I.T Bombay in Civil Engineering in 1998. He also has aadditional M.S. and Ph.D, both in Mathematics that he received in 2004 and 2007 respectively from Virginia Tech. He obtained the P.E. license in Electrical Engineering from the State of Ohio in 1995. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and also the Co-director of the Transportation Research Center in the College of Engineering at UNLV. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He was a research engineer in the Robotics R&D Laboratory of the Lincoln Electric Co. from 1992 to 1994, after which he was a research scientist at the Center for Transportation Research at Virginia Tech for about three years. He has written eight books (Feedback Control Theory for Dynamic Traffic Assignment, Springer-Verlag, 1999, Incident Management in Intelligent Transportation Systems, Artech House, 1999, Feedback Ramp Metering for Intelligent Transportations Systems, Kluwer 2003, Mobile Robotic Car Design, McGraw-Hill, 2004, Practical and Experimental Robotics, CRC, 2007, Pedestrian Dynamics: Feedback Control of Crowd Evacuation, Springer, 2008, Model Abstraction in Dynamical Systems: Application to Mobile Robot Control, LNCIS, Springer, 2008, Pedestrian Dynamics: Mathematical Theory and Evacuation Control), three edited volumes and overall about hundred publications. He has been the chairman of ITS and Mobile Robotics sessions of SPIE conference multiple times. His research interests are in theory and applications of nonlinear and hybrid control systems. Applications of interest are in many diverse fields such as mathematical learning theory, distributed processors, distributed robotics, communication networks, and transportation systems. He received the award of "The Most Outstanding New Professor" from the College of Engineering at Virginia tech. in 2001, and Dean's Teaching Award in 2005.