【参会指南！北京直飞爱丁堡！】第四届机器人和控制工程国际会议（RobCE 2024）邀您参会！

摘要：Globally, 15M people suffer a stroke every year, causing 6M deaths and leaving another 5M permanently disabled, which makes stroke the second leading cause of disability worldwide . In the UK, strokes affect over 152,000 Britons each year. Currently, there are over 1.2 million people living with the effects of stroke in the UK, and the estimated direct and indirect costs of stroke care for the NHS are >£9 billion a year. According to UK Guidelines for stroke rehabilitation, patients should receive at least 45 minutes of therapy per day for a minimum of 5 days per week; however, this standard has never been met due to the deceasing availability of rehabilitation services and increasing pressure on the NHS. In the UK, there are > 600,000 stroke patients that live further than 20km from a stroke support group, and the majority of them have severe mobility issues, it would be very challenging and costly, or even impossible for them to travel and receive regular rehabilitation treatment in hospitals or rehabilitation centers. The NHS' Five Year Forward View made recommendations in 2017 to bring rehabilitation to people in their own homes and care homes.

This talk will discuss the key societal challenges and robotic technologies for delivering effective care and opportunities for the healthcare industry. It will cover the recent development of robotics for stroke rehabilitation, the research gaps and the need for new technologies in neuroscience, robotics, control and artificial intelligence. The talk will also introduce a EPSRC-funded project on intelligent reconfigurable exoskeletons tailored to meet patients’ needs, deliver effective diagnosis and personalised treatment, and monitored remotely by rehabilitation therapists. The key projects conducted at the Leeds Centre for Assistive/Rehabilitation Robotics will be introduced including peanumatic Peano muscle, DEA, soft exoskeleton, bilaterial robot, neuromuscular and brain computer interfaces. The focus is placed on the enabling technologies for those whose strength and coordination have been affected by amputation, stroke, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy and ageing.

摘要：In this network-connected world, many tasks require coordination and cooperation of subsystems/agents via network connection. Multi-agent systems are good examples of interplay between network communication and control applications. Finite-time control and finite-time mechanisms have been significantly developed to ensure the convergence of controlled variables in finite-time, and hence it is very appealing to various applications, including cooperative control of autonomous systems such as robotics and vehicles. This talk will briefly review some fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems and finite-time control mechanisms,  and their further developments in engineering applications. It will then focus on formation and cooperative control mobile robots and autonomous vehicles. In particular, the talk will cover in details of some important methods, such as affine and bearing-only formation control algorithms which rely on the stress matrices and bearing. It will also cover distributed motion control algorithms to ensure autonomous overtaking of autonomous vehicles in a dynamic environment using the Artificial Potential Field (APF) method based on a robust autonomous vehicle platoon system.