UTC-IASE Professor Xu Chen and student Dan Wang received the Best Paper Award at the 2018 International Symposium on Flexible Automation (ISFA). The ISFA was initiated in 1986 under the co-sponsorship of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) and the Institute of Systems, Control, and Information Engineers (ISCIE) in Japan. The symposium focuses on automation technologies that are essential to meet the increasing requirements of modern manufacturing and other related fields, such as dynamical systems, robotics, logistics, medical systems, and healthcare systems. The 2018 symposium was held in Kanazawa japan from July 15th, to July 19th. Each year, the symposium recognizes the two best papers appearing in the proceedings and presented at the symposium. One award emphasizes the paper’s contribution to theory, and the other award emphasized significant or innovative applications/practices. Criteria for selection include the quality of the written and oral presentation, the technical contribution, timeliness, and practicality. Each awardee is given a certificate and an honorarium of $1,000.

 

The paper, titled “Synthesis and Analysis of Multirate Repetitive Control for Fractional-order Periodic Disturbance Rejection in Powder Bed Fusion”, discusses control approaches to advance the quality of repetitive energy deposition in powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing. More specifically, it pertains to the repetitive deposition of the laser or electron beam energy. The paper addresses an intrinsic limitation in control schemes that can be used to leverage the periodicity of task patterns to significantly improve system performance. Some of the long-term impacts anticipated for this work include greater quality assurance of the manufactured parts, new capabilities for large-scale 3D printing of extreme materials, and smarter machines and automation in additive manufacturing processes.