Dawn Tilbury

I am a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I have a courtesy appointment in the EECS department. My research interests lie in the area of control systems, and I am a member of the Controls Group in the College of Engineering.

My undergraduate degree is in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. I did my M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California in Berkeley, in the EECS Department in the Intelligent Machines and Robotics Laboratory. As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar at various places including: the robotics group at LAAS in Toulouse, LSS at Supelec in Paris, LIDS at MIT, and the robotics lab at Harvard.

During my sabbatical leave in 2001-2002, I was an Academic Visitor at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY in the Performance Management Group, and a Visiting Professor at ITIA, the Institute for Industrial Technologies and Automation, in Milan, Italy. During the summer of 2003, I was a summer professor intern at DaimlerChrysler in the Advance Manufacturing Engineering group in Auburn Hills, MI. In May 2004, I taught a course (ME 360) at Shanghai JiaoTong University as part of the UM-SJTU cooperative agreement. I am an alumna of the Defense Science Study Group; see Annie Anton's web page for a description of our activities. Now I am a member of Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group.

My office number is 3124 G. G. Brown, phone (734) 936-2129, fax (734) 647-3170, and my mailing address is:

Mechanical Engineering Department
University of Michigan
2250 G. G. Brown Building
2350 Hayward Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2125 USA

but it's much easier to just send email: tilbury@umich.edu.

Research

My research interests include logic control for manufacturing systems and networked control systems I work with the ERC for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems to develop modular control systems. We have a Reconfigurable Factory Testbed (RFT) on which we implement many of the control methodologies that we develop. Follow the link to see the video of the RFT demonstration.

I also worked with colleagues at IBM in the application of control theory to computing systems, see our book on Feedback Control of Computing Systems. I have also done some work in nonlinear control, both theory and applications, looking at problems of trajectory generation and stabilization for nonlinear systems, and applications to such systems as a helicopter and mobile robots.

The best way to find a listing of my publications is via Google Scholar.

ASME-DSC Conference 2008

I am on the organizing committee for the first Annual ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, to be held in Ann Arbor, October 20-22, 2008. Check the website for the call for papers.

WODES 2006

I co-organized the 8th International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (WODES), held in Ann Arbor, July 10-12, 2006. Check the website for photos of the conference, banquet, and dinner trek.

Teaching

ME360, Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Dynamic Systems.
Fall 1997, Winter 1998, Winter 2000, Winter 2001, Winter 2003, Winter 2004, Fall 2006.

ME395, Laboratory I.
Winter 1999, Winter 2000, Fall 2002, Winter 2004, Winter 2005, Winter 2006.

ME461, Automatic Control.
Winter 1995, Winter 1996, Fall 1998, Fall 1999, Fall 2005.

ME540/Aero540, Introduction to Dynamics.
Fall 2004.

ME561/EECS561/Aero571, Design of Digital Control Systems.
Winter 1997.

ME564/EECS560/Aero550, Linear Systems Theory.
Fall 1996, Fall 1998, Fall 2000.

ME/EECS/Mfg 567, Introduction to Robotics
Winter 2007, Winter 2008

ME662/EECS 662/Aero 672, Advanced Nonlinear Control.
Fall 1995.

Control Tutorials for Matlab and Simulink

In conjunction with teaching ME461, I developed a set of web-based tutorials to introduce students to the use of Matlab for the design and analysis of control systems. These tutorials won an Undergraduate Computational Science Award from the US Department of Energy through the Ames Laboratory, and the Educom Medal, nominated by ASME. The NSF supported the original development these tutorials. An updated (for Matlab 5) and expanded (to include Simulink tutorials) version of the tutorials was published by Addison-Wesley (now Prentice Hall) in 1999; it is now out-of-print and is available on the web at the link above.

Workshop on Logic Control

In June 2000, I co-organized a Workshop on Logic Control for Manufacturing Systems, which brought together industry practitioners and academic researchers to discuss problems and solutions. One of the outcomes of the workshop was a list of the Top 10 Challenges in Logic Control for Manufacturing Systems.

Feel free to check out what my book club is reading this month, or read about and see pictures from my recent trip to Nepal.

I will be out of the office on the following dates during Summer 2008:

7/13/08 dmt