Newsletter Archives; Winter 2001
Associate Professor Santosh Devasia
Santosh Devasia Brings Mechatronics Expertise to M.E.
Santosh Devasia joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Associate Professor effective Fall 2000. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1993. Before joining the UW, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he taught from 1994-2000.Dr. Devasia's research interests lie in the areas of Dynamics, Controls, and Mechatronics. Current research projects include a mix of theoretical developments and experimental efforts. On the theoretical side, Dr. Devasia's research efforts are aimed at developing control theories for distributed systems. Intelligent systems are becoming more common in our households-even lawn mowers can have an embedded controller and can be automated. As appliances and individual systems become more intelligent and capable of communicating with each other, the issue of overall management (i.e., control) of such distributed sub-systems becomes important. One of the main challenges in the design of controllers for such systems is complexity, especially when designing controllers for increasingly large, distributed systems (with thousands of intelligent subsystems). Although centralized controllers might yield the best possible performance, the sheer complexity of large systems necessitates the distribution of control. In contrast to a central controller that micro-manages complex systems, the paradigm is to use central controllers to choose general guidelines and rules which are then adopted by the individual agents. Key research issues include the development and implementation of distributed control laws that guarantee optimality of operations for all the agents in the distributed system. Tools from cellular automaton (with the addition of distributed control), information technologies, and operations research are being used in the current work, which is presently focused on applications in autonomous air traffic management, and distributed autonomous robotics.
Current experimental research efforts include vibration compensation in high-precision, positioning systems, which have applications in advanced technology areas like opto-electronics, semiconductors, smart-structures, high-density information storage, and nanotechnology. The research aims to compensate for vibrations that limit the bandwidth of ultra-high resolution positioning stages, in which transient vibrations are induced during high-speed positioning maneuvers. The research aims to compensate for these nonlinear vibrations using corrective inputs that account for system dynamics, and thereby achieve high-precision positioning. The main goal of current research efforts is to achieve high-precision output tracking (precision positioning) by exploiting the known system model through an inversion-based approach. In addition to positioning applications in nanotechnology, the research results have also been applied to biomedical applications like hyperthermia, chemical-processing applications like minimizing off-specification products in polymer-manufacturing, and high-precision guidance of aerospace systems.
Dr. Devasia's teaching interests include controls, dynamics, and mechatronics. The mechatronics approach integrates concepts from modeling, mechanisms, control, microcontrollers, and electronics for designing modern systems. At the U. of Washington, he plans to develop courses and novel undergraduate senior-level Capstone Projects in the mechatronics area with an emphasis on his research interests in nanotechnology,biomedical applications, and distributed systems.
Dr. Devasia would be eager to discuss teaching, and research issues in mechatronics, nanotechnology, biomedical applications, and distributed systems. He can be contacted through email: devasia@u.washington.edu or by phone (206) 685 3401.
