PHM Batteries Robotics Controls
Dr. Zhang's research falls into these three interconnected areas of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), Intelligent Systems, and Systems and Controls, which are the keys to designing smart systems with self-situational-awareness and self-adapting capabilities to meet continuously growing requirements at different levels: performance (by advanced design and control), intelligence (by adaptation, learning, cooperation, and fusion), and reliability/survivability (by fault detection and isolation, failure prognosis, fault tolerance and reconfiguration). The three areas are integrated by a mix of theory, design, and implementation.
Conventional solutions to these requirements are often designed in a passive and ad-hoc fashion. For instance, the work may design a controller with a fixed structure and parameters based on limited a priori knowledge and the worst-case scenario to guarantee the required performance. In contrast, active approaches are able to monitor the changes in system health, environment and user behavior and adapt to such changes accordingly. These approaches, due to their promising features and solutions, attract more and more attention.
Dr. Zhangs research strives to design active approaches to achieve afore mentioned intelligent smart systems. His current work includes two aspects:
- Diagnosis and prognosis using physics-based model and data-driven techniques, as well as computational intelligence techniques including pattern recognition and machine learning;
- Fault-tolerance and health management of nonlinear systems using adaptive, learning, optimal and intelligent analysis and control approaches.
These technologies not only maximize system safety, reliability, availability, and survivability, but also substantially reduce the logistic and maintenance cost. When large-scale complex systems are considered, particular attention needs to be paid to environment-and human-in-the-loop, as well as distributed and cooperative health monitoring. The application domains of interest to demonstrate my research results will be structure health monitoring, unmanned/manned vehicles, power distribution systems, multi-agent systems, and networked systems.