Seminar Details

Mechanical Engineering is hosting a Distinguished Lecture by DSI Council member Bert Tanner Wednesday, April 5, 2023 11 a.m. 

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ABSTRACT
Our oceans remain among the least explored regions on our planet, and yet they are a critical component of life on earth: not only do they offer food, mineral, and fuel resources but they also regulate climate. In our quest to learn more about them and thus understand how we can make our coastal communities more resilient against the inevitable climate change, as well as develop our blue economy in a sustainable way, marine robotics and automation can play a key role. This talk explores some specific aspects of marine robotics that pertain to planning, control, and navigation of autonomous marine vehicles involved in environmental monitoring and observation missions. This presentation highlights the importance of incorporating critical domain expertise from relevant fields of environmental monitoring and modeling, into the technical approach to marine robotic vehicle planning and control problems.

BIOGRAPHY
Bert Tanner received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the NTUA, Athens, Greece, in 2001. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2003, and subsequently took a position as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. In 2008 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he is currently a professor. In 2019 he was appointed Director of the Center for Autonomous and Robotics Systems. Tanner’s research interests range from multi-robot system planning and control, flocking and swarming, constrained navigation, heterogeneous agent coordination, and hybrid systems, with application domains that span a diverse range from radiation detection, to pediatric rehabilitation and marine robotics. He received NSF’s Career award in 2005, he is a fellow of the ASME, and a senior member of IEEE. He has served in the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He is currently an associate editor for the IFAC’s journals Automatica and Nonlinear Analysis Hybrid Systems, and he is a chief specialty editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI: multi-robot systems. He has also been serving in several conference editorial boards of both IEEE Control Systems and IEEE Robotics and Automation Societies.