Title: Planning and Control for a Class of Rotor-Driven Hybrid Aerial and Terrestrial Vehicles 

Abstract:  The hybrid aerial and terrestrial (HAT) vehicles possess mobility in the air and on the ground. Compared with UAVs, UGVs, and UAV-UGV collaborations, the HAT vehicles have shown significant advantages in accessibility and endurance, leading to great potential in large-range unknown environment exploration, long-distance delivery, etc. This talk will summarize the state-of-the-art of the rotor-driven HAT vehicles, present some progresses on configuration design, planning and smooth-transition control of two classes of rotor-driven HAT vehicles via multimodal design, NMPC, etc., and finally give the future works. 

Biography: Lixian Zhang received the Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2006. From January 2007 to September 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department Mechanical Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada. He was a Visiting Professor at the Process Systems Engineering Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, from February 2012 to March 2013. Since January 2009, he has been with Harbin Institute of Technology, where he is currently full professor and vice dean of School of Astronautics. His research interests include multimodal systems, model predictive control, and their applications in the field of specialized robots. Prof. Zhang serves as Senior Editor for IEEE Control Systems Letters, and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, etc. He was named to the list of Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in 2016–2021. He is a recipient of the NSFC for Outstanding Young Scholars. He is a Fellow of IEEE.