Abstract:
In recent years, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has attracted a lot of interests. WSN consists of inexpensive and low-power communication devices with inbuilt sensors called sensor nodes which are spatially distributed to cooperatively monitor physical and environmental conditions. WSN has been identified as a key technological area and new frontier which holds the potential to dramatically change the way we live. Due to the limited power and bandwidth, harsh quantization is needed in WSN. In this talk, we shall first give a brief introduction to WSN and its potential applications in environmental monitoring, surveillance, industrial automation and healthcare.  We then discuss issues related to quantized control and estimation. In particular, we shall focus on the quantized Kalman filtering which is concerned with the design of both the optimal quantizer and filter.  Performance of the quantized filter including its convergence will be analysed. A WSN platform that we have developed for target tracking will be demonstrated. The platform has the functions of sensor node energy monitoring, competition based sensor scheduling, distributed target estimation, and Labview based software system for network status monitoring via mobile devices such as PDA or Laptop.

About the Speaker:
Lihua Xie received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 1992. Since 1992, he has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is currently a professor and the Director, Centre for Intelligent Machines. He concurrently holds an adjunct appointment as a Changjiang Professor with South China University of Technology.

Prof. Xie research interests include robust control and estimation, sensor networks, networked control systems, time delay systems, and control of disk drive systems. In these areas, he has published 150 journal papers and co-authored two patents and three books. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of IET Proceedings on Control Theory and Applications.  He served as an associate editor of International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems from 2004 to 2006 and an associate editor of the Conference Editorial Board, IEEE Control Systems Society from 2000 to 2005. He was the General Chairman of the 9th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision and the Program Chair of the forth IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation and the 8th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics a
nd Vision. Prof. Xie is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of Institution of Engineers, Singapore.