September Meeting: September 4, 2008

Date and Time

Thursday, September 4, 7:00PM Pacific
at 7:00, 5-minute business meeting
at 7:05, speaker presentation

Location

Carnegie Mellon University West Coast (directions https://west.cmu.edu/who_we_are/visitor)

Title

A Tale of Three Actuators: How Mechanics, Business Models and Position Sensing Affect Different Mechatronic Servo Problems.

Speaker

Dr. Danny Abramovitch, Agilent Laboratories, Santa Clara, California

Abstract

Students studying control problems often learn a lot of wondrous algorithms that impart near mythical properties to the systems that they are applied to. At least this is how it works in theory and simulation. In practice, however, a thorough understanding of the system, the use model, and the market is often far more important than the differences between any two optimization algorithms. Knowing when and where a particular algorithm is useful is typically at the heart of real control problems.

This talk will focus on three servo systems with which the speaker has had considerable experience: hard disks, optical disks, and atomic force microscopes. By examining how the particulars of these three systems affect the use of control algorithms, the speaker will try to extract some general lessons.

Biographies

Dr. Daniel Abramovitch:

Daniel Abramovitch was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He earned degrees in Electrical Engineering from Clemson (BS) and Stanford (MS and Ph.D.), doing his doctoral work under the direction of Gene Franklin. Upon graduation, and after a brief stay at Ford Aerospace, he accepted a job at Hewlett-Packard Labs, working on control issues for optical and magnetic disk drives for 11 1/2 years. He moved to Agilent Laboratories shortly after the spin off from Hewlett-Packard, where he has spent the last 8 years working on test and measurement systems.

Danny is a Senior Member of the IEEE and was Vice Chair for Industry and Applications for the 2004 American Control Conference (ACC) in Boston. He is Vice Chair for Workshops at the 2006 ACC in Minneapolis, for Special Sessions at the 2007 ACC in New York, and for Industry and Applications at the 2009 ACC in St. Louis. He has helped organize conference tutorial sessions on topics as varied as disk drives, atomic force microscopes, and phase-locked loops. He serves as the Chair of the IEEE CSS History Committee. Danny is credited with the original idea for the clocking mechanism behind the DVD+RW optical disk format and is co-inventor on the fundamental patent. He was on the team that prototyped Agilent’s first 40Gbps Bit Error Rate Tester (BERT) and was able to cite a Douglas Adams book in one of his patents relating to that device. Along with his co-author, Gene Franklin, he was awarded the 2003 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award. He currently is doing research on future atomic force microscopes for Agilent. He has multiple publications and patent applications in this area.