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Alireza Farhadi

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (signal processing and control group)

The Melbourne School of Engineering (August 2011 - present)

Email: alireza.farhadi@unimelb.edu.au

 

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Systems & Control and Telecommunications), December 2007

The University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Ph.D. thesis: Stochastic Control through Capacity Limited Channels

Advisors: C. D. Charalambous and N. U. Ahmed

Email: afarhadi@alumni.uottawa.ca

Current Research Activity: 

Distributed MPC (model predictive control) based on agent negotiation subject to communication and computation constraints (control/communication/computation/scalability co-design)

Qualifications:

Solid knowledge in control design methodologies
Solid knowledge in Telecommunications and Information Theory
Hands-on experience in systems integration
Hands-on experience in controls tuning
Hands-on experience in designing instrumentation devices

Research Interests:

Design, optimization and control of complex systems (e.g., Cyber-Physical Systems - CPS)

Tracking and control of multi-agent systems: Distributed robotics, fleets of  Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), fleets of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), fleets of autonomous ground/road vehicles

Tracking and control of interconnected distributed systems

Bilateral tele-operation  of AUVs, UAVs, and autonomous ground/road vehicles

Networked control systems

Information theoretic aspects of estimation and control over noisy channels


Frequent Reviewer Of The Following Journals:

IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

IEEE Transactions on Communications

IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

Automatica

International Journal of Systems, Control and Communication

International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control

Asian Journal of Control

Employment:

 

Feb. 2010 – present:                       Post doctoral fellow

INRIA (the French national institute for research in computer science and control), Grenoble, France

Research topic: Tracking and localization of an underwater source flow (fresh water, chemical pollution, etc.) with unknown location via a fleet of AUVs (http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr/projet/connect/)

Advisor: Carlos Canudas de-Wit

 

Sep. 2008 – Aug. 2009:                   Post doctoral fellow

The University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Research topic: Large scale automated interacting systems over wireless communication networks and structural health monitoring and control systems via wireless networks of distributed smart sensors

Advisor: N. U. Ahmed

 

 May 2008 – Aug.2008:                   Research associate

                                                                The University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Research topic: Reliable communication over the Internet

Advisor: N. U. Ahmed

 

 

Jan. 2002 – Dec. 2006:                     Teaching assistant

                                                                The University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Signal and systems, control engineering, linear systems, modern control engineering

 

Awards:

 

April 2009:                                           The University of Ottawa travel grant, $550      
                    

Dec. 2005:                                           IEEE Control System Society travel grant, $600                                 

Dec. 2005:                                           The University of Ottawa travel grant, $600                                              

June 2005:                                           13th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation,  best paper award

Dec. 2004:                                           The University of Ottawa travel grant, $600      

Jan. 2002 – Dec. 2005:                    The University of Ottawa graduate admission scholarship, $24,000

Jan. 2002 – Dec. 2005:                The University of Ottawa international tuition fee scholarship, $24,000         

                                         

 

Refereed Publications:

Journal Publications:

Published articles:

         1-    Farhadi, A., and Ahmed, N. U., Suboptimal decentralized control over noisy communication channels, Systems and Control Letters, 60, pp. 285-293, April 2011 (control/communication/scalability co-design) Click Here.  

     2-  Farhadi, A., and Ahmed, N. U., Tracking nonlinear noisy dynamic systems over noisy communication channels, IEEE Transactions on Communications, 59(4), pp. 955 - 961, April 2011 (control/communication/scalability co-design) Click Here.

3-  Farhadi, A.,  and Charalambous, C. D., Stability and reliable data reconstruction of uncertain dynamic systems over finite capacity channels, Automatica, 46(5), pp. 889-896, May 2010, (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

 

4-   Farhadi, A., and Charalambous, C. D., Robust coding for a class of sources: applications in control and reliable communication over limited capacity channels, Systems and Control Letters, 57(12), pp. 1005-1012, December 2008 (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

 

5-  Charalambous, C. D., and Farhadi, A., LQG optimality and separation principle for general discrete time partially observed stochastic systems over finite capacity communication channels, Automatica, 44(12), pp. 3181-3188, December 2008 (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

 

6-   Charalambous, C. D.,  Farhadi, A., and Denic, S. Z., Control of continuous-time linear Gaussian systems over additive Gaussian wireless fading channels: a separation principle, IEEE Transactions on Automatic control, 53(4), pp. 1013-1019, May 2008 (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

    

Under review article:

7- Farhadi, A. and Ahmed, N. U., Shannon entropy and tracking dynamic systems over noisy  channels, under review in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, as a regular paper, October 2011 (control/communication co-design).

 

Conference Proceedings:

Published articles:

1-  Farhadi, A., and Canudas de Wit, C., A integration framework for control/communication/computation (3C) co-design with application in fleet control of AUVs, in proceedings of the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florida, December 2011 Click Here .

             

2-      Farhadi, A., and Ahmed, N. U., Decentralized suboptimal control via limited capacity channels, in Proceedings of the 2009 American Control Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, June 2009, pp. 3525 - 3530 (control/communication/scalability co-design) Click Here.

 

3-      Farhadi, A., and Charalambous, C. D., Robust stabilizing scheme for uncertain systems controlled over limited capacity Additive White Gaussian Noise channels, in Proceedings of the 2008 American Control Conference, June 2008, pp. 3644-3649 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

4-      Farhadi, A., and Charalambous, C. D., Robust control of a class of feedback systems subject to limited capacity constraints, in Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 2007, pp. 3970-3975 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here .

 

5-     Charalambous, C. D. and Farhadi, A., Control of feedback systems subject to the finite rate constraints via Shannon lower bound, in Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks, Cyprus, April 2007, pp. 1-7 (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

 

6-      Farhadi, A., and Charalambous, C. D., Control of tele-operation systems subject to capacity limited channels and uncertainty, in Proceedings of the IEEE Canada, Ottawa, May 2006, pp. 492-497 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

7-      Charalambous, C. D., and Farhadi, A., A mathematical framework for robust control over uncertain communication channels, in  Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Seville, Spain, December 2005, pp. 2530-2535 (control/communication co-design) Click Here.

 

8-      Charalambous, C. D., Denic, S. Z.,  and Farhadi, A., Control over wireless communication channel for continuous-time systems, in  Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Seville, Spain, December  2005, pp. 3225-3230 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

9-      Charalambous, C. D., and Farhadi, A., Robust entropy rate for uncertain sources and its applications in controlling systems subject to capacity constraints, in Proceedings of 43rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computation, Allerton House, Chicago, September 2005, pp. 1297 - 1306 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

10-      Charalambous, C. D.,  Farhadi, A.,  Denic, S., and Rezaei, F., Robust control over uncertain communication channels, in Proceedings of the 13th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, Cyprus, June 2005, pp. 737-742 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

11-   Charalambous, C. D., and Farhadi, A., Robust entropy rate for uncertain sources: applications to communication and control systems, in Proceedings of the 9th Canadian Workshop on Information Theory, Montreal, June 2005, pp. 307-310 (control/communication co-design)  Click Here.

 

12-   Charalambous, C. D.,  Farhadi, A., and Djouadi, S. M., Action functional stochastic H_{infty} estimation for nonlinear discrete time systems, in  Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, USA, December 2002, pp. 1028-1033  Click Here.

 

13-   Farhadi, A., and Farrokhi, M., Improvement of neuro-predictive control using a new scheme for training, in Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Modeling, Identification, and Control, Austria, February 2001, pp. 398-402.

Under review article:

     14- Farhadi, A., Cantoni, M., and Dower, P., Performance and information pattern trade-offs in a consensus based distributed optimization method, under review in Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Control Conference (control/communication/computation/scalability co-design).

 

Workshop Tutorial Presentation:

        1-   Charalambous, C. D.,  Rezaei, F.,  Denic, S.,  Kyprianou, A.,  and Farhadi, A., Robust information transmission and control subject to uncertainty and power constraints, workshop H-2 (half a day) presented by above authors in the 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Bahamas, December 2004 (Ph.D. work).

        2-  Farhadi, A., Novel design methodologies for emerging complex systems, presented at the first HYCON2 workshop (http://www.hycon2.eu/?page=6&id=2&wpid=2), Eindhoven, the Netherland, March 29-30, 2011 (post doctoral work).

Technical Reports:


  1. (INRIA: Farhadi, A., Garin, F., and Canudas de Wit, C.), (University of Padova), (University of Seville), Control subject to transmission constraints, no transmission errors, Deliverable Report for the FeedNetBack European Project, ID: INRIA_UNIPD_D3.01_V01, in 48 pages, July 2011, soon will be available online at the FeedNetBack website: http://www.feednetback.eu/public-deliverables (I contributed to Section 2)

  2. (ETH Zurich), (INRIA: Farhadi, A., and Canudas de Wit, C.), (University of Padova), (Videotech), Integration of control, communication, computation, complexity and energy consideration in a coherent design strategy, Deliverable Report for the FeedNetBack European Project, ID: ETH_D06-01_28FEB2011_V2, in 66 pages, Feb. 2011, soon will be available online at the FeedNetBack website: http://www.feednetback.eu/public-deliverables (I contributed to Sections 2, 3 and 4.1)

  3. Farhadi, A., and Canudas de Wit, C., Multi – level classification and formulation of an integration framework for Estimation/ Communication/ Computation (EC2) co-design, Interim Report for the FeedNetBack European Project, ID: INRIA_D06-01_25July2010_V1, in 39 pages, July 2010. (available online at http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00536613/en).

 

Experimental Work Experience:

1- Design and development of PD (proportional-derivative), PI (proportional-integrator), and PID (proportional-integrator-derivative) controllers using passive electronic elements and Op-Amps for controlling position/speed of electronic motors.

2-Design and development of an experimental set up for remote computer control of a security camera.

3-Design and development of a thermometer.

4-Design and development of an acceleration sensor. 

 

Brief Description of My Experimental Work Experience:

 

1- Design and Development of PI, PD, and PID controller for controlling speed and position of an armature control DC motor: 

This project was part of my teaching duties for the Systems and Control course taught at the University of Ottawa. I was asked to design appropriate experiments for students enrolled in this course. In this project, first I used available catalogue and I modeled an armature control DC motor using transfer functions. Then, using analytical methods I designed PI, PD, and PID controller. Next, I performed computer simulations (using MATLAB) to make sure the performance of my design is satisfactory. Then, I used Op-Amps (LM741) and passive electronic elements (e.g., resistor, capacitor, and trimmers) and I built these controllers. Finally, I applied these controllers to DC motor; and I used trimmers for final tuning. In addition I wrote an instruction manual for students and in this manual I described the required steps to be taken by students. I spent almost 70 hours to complete this project. My teaching evaluation for this course was excellent. PI, PD and PID controllers are commonly used in industry. In fact 95% of factory automation is based on them. The controllers developed in this project are similar to those which are used in industry.

 

2- Design and Development of an experimental set up for remote computer control of a security camera:

 

This project was part of my undergraduate program. In this experiment, I used FM (frequency modulation) receiver/transmitter to exchange control data from remote camera to computer. I used computer slots and C programming to collect the data. Then I designed appropriate control signals using digital control techniques and I applied these signals to remote system using FM transmitter/receiver. I spent a semester to complete this project and I got full mark for this course. Remote computer control is commonly used in industry; and I can use the knowledge, that I acquired in this experiment, in real industrial environment.

 

3-Design and Development of a thermometer:


I designed this instrument for a company. In this experiment, I used thermistor and I built the so called “Electronic Circuit Bridge” to measure temperature. This bridge consists of a thermistor, a resistor and two trimmers (that I used for calibration). Then, I built the so called “Three Op-Amps Instrumentation Amplifiers” (that I designed using Op-07) and I used LCD (liquid crystal display) to show temperature.


4- Design and Development of an acceleration sensor:


This project was part of my undergraduate program and I spent a semester to complete this project. In this experiment, I used ceramic piezoelectric to sense the acceleration. Then, I built three Op-Amps instrumentation amplifiers and I used LCD display to show the acceleration. In this experiment I used trimmers for tuning and calibrations. Acceleration sensors are commonly used in industry for monitoring vibration.

 

SOFTWARE KNOWLEDGE:

I frequently use Matlab, Simulink, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Microsoft office, and Latex. I also have experience in Labview and C programming for real time measurement and control.

 


 

Last updated: May 2, 2012.