Quanser at the ACC

I just came back from 2010 American Control Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The ACC is the annual conference of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). This year, the conference had gathered more than 1,000 scientists and researchers from all over the world. Dynamics and control, hybrid systems, adaptive and learning control, powertrain modeling, unmanned vehicles control, green energy, nonlinear systems, and optimization were some of the many topics covered in the conference.

Quanser's expertise in control systems is well known at global control conferences including the ACC. This year, Quanser had an overwhelming and outstanding participation at the conference with astonishing unmanned systems live interactive demo and a three-station booth filled with a wide range of Quanser products. Both the booth and the unmanned systems demo were highly appreciated by the visitors.

At one station of our booth, we were presenting Quanser's servos and inverted pendulum powered by our real-time software QUARC. In the booth just beside this station, The MathWorks was presenting a related experiment: ball and curved beam. This experiment was developed by Dr. Levine at the University of Maryland and it was using Quanser's servo, data acquisition board, and real-time software QUARC. You can see Dr. Levine's experiment in action here.

Ball and Curved Beam Experiment Developed at the University of Maryland

At the second station, we were presenting Quanser's 3 DOF Gyroscope and virtual plant simulators. The non-minimum phase dynamics of the gyroscope attracted quite a few researchers and students. The simulation and visualization of Quanser's Active Suspension plant under QUARC had its own fans and followers as well. The third station was dedicated to Quanser latest haptic device, HD^2. This station attracted some researchers interested in the field of haptics, robotics, and teleoperation. Surgical simulators and interaction with different types of virtual environments were some of the demos presented at station 3.

Quanser’s champion demo at the booth was the prototype of a Wind Turbine experiment. This platform will be part of our company’s green energy product line. It attracted many professors and students to the booth. An iPad was used as a graphical user interface to tune different parameters of the system. The controller and data acquisition was implemented using QUARC. This system is highly nonlinear by nature which makes it a great experimental platform for advanced level research. It can also be used within a linear region for under graduate students.

Please note the Wind Turbine experiment is still under development and is not available for purchase at this time. If you have any comments about this experiment, please contact info@quanser.com

Quanser Booth at the American Control Conference 2010

This year at ACC, Quanser surprised all visitors by presenting the UVS Innovation Hub, an interactive and live demo of Quanser's unmanned vehicle systems. Attracting over 200 delegates, the presentation consisted of our indoor unmanned vehicles lab, Quanser's Qball, and Qbot. During the demo visitors could learn about unmanned technology for both educational and research purposes developed by Quanser. They also got a chance to control our Qball and fly it. Below, I have included a video for those of you who missed the show this year. Quanser's Innovation Hub received overwhelming appreciation and encouragement from 200 people who stopped by.

Quanser interactive UVS demonstration at the American Control Conference 2010