UPEI graduate student receives Best Student Paper Award at IEEE international symposium
Duy Anh Nguyen, a Master of Science student in the Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Trung Dung Ngo, professor of robotics and intelligent systems, received the Best Student Paper Award during the 16th IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration.
Held in Vietnam earlier this year, the symposium drew 450 participants from 33 countries. Nguyen won the award for a paper titled “Distributed Cascade Force Control of Soft-Tactile-Based Multi-robot System for Object Transportation.” His paper was selected for the award out of 350 submissions.
The paper addressed a well-known research problem in robotics: the use of multiple mobile robots to transport goods in daily life settings, such as heavy objects in factories and warehouses. One of the main research questions it addressed was how to develop a distributed force controller that enables multiple mobile robots to work together to push an object in a specific direction. Another was how to design a smart sensor system that can measure the applied and reflected force of a robot on the surface of an object.
Nguyen and the research team he worked with developed a high-level control system consisting of an inner and an outer loop control. Using a soft-tactile sensor designed by the Soft Haptics Lab of the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), the inner loop control maintains the robots’ pushing contact and adjustable force on the object, while the outer loop control coordinates the force applied by the robots to the object to move it toward a certain direction without inter-robot communication. They also demonstrated and validated the control systems in simulation and a real-world demonstration.
The paper is based on joint research by the JAIST Soft Haptics Lab, led by Associate Professor Van Anh Ho, and the UPEI More-Than-One Robotics (Morelab) Lab led by Ngo. The collaborative work took place when JAIST PhD student Nhat Minh Dinh Le studied at the Morelab from December 2022 to April 2023. Also contributing to the research were Dr. Hung Duy Pham, a former postdoctoral researcher of MoreLab and now an assistant professor at Vietnam National University-UET, and Dr. Nhan Huu Nhan, an assistant professor at JAIST.
The idea for this award-winning research was initiated about two years ago, based on Ngo’s solid foundation in multi-agent robotic systems, one of the main research thrusts of his robotics lab. He and his students have studied and investigated various technical aspects and potential applications of multi-robot systems, such as in search and rescue emergencies. Nguyen’s paper was one of the first results in the new research direction of collective object transportation by multi-robot systems. He and the research team are continuing their work in this challenging field.
