Sung Cha - a rising star
Postgraduate student, Sung Han Cha, was awarded the National Committee on Automatic Control and Instrumentation Undergraduate Thesis Prize by Engineers Australia at a ceremony in Sydney on 1 June 2007.
Sung (and others in the College) had to keep the award under wraps until it was officially announced on Friday.
"Sung was a gifted student in the Research and Development Scholarship Program at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology," said Dr Rob Mahony from the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, who supervised Sung during his (Honours) Bachelor thesis in 2006.
"It was a pleasure to work with Sung and his award is richly deserved," he said.
Sung's thesis entitled, "Coupled Non-linear State Estimation and Control for Low-cost Aerial Robotic Vehicles," investigates the development of a non-linear attitude filtering and control algorithm for attitude stabilization of any Aerial Robotic Vehicles, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
"Most existing remote control systems for UAVs are tele-operative systems. That is, a trained operator controls the vehicle with on-board cameras while the vehicle orientation is stabilised automatically using an on-board controller," said Sung.
"These remote control systems are essential to the UAVs performance. Currently many UAVs use an expensive Inertial Navigation System (INS) to determine where they are in the air, so that they can then be told where to go," said Sung.
"At the moment these are in operation mainly in military vehicles, but the commercial world is also interested in UAVs for other applications like dangerous search and rescue, high building inspections and so on. To make them cost-effective and robust enough for commercial use, researchers like me are looking at ways to come up with a cheaper remote control system that doesn't compromise performance, and this is what my thesis is about," he said.
Sung obtained his Year 12 Certificate from Narrabundah College in the ACT, gaining a UAI of 99.90 (top 0.1 percent in Australia). He is now studying for his PhD with Distinguished Professor Brian D. O. Anderson, who is acknowledged worldwide as the pioneer of systems control research in Australia.
"Sung's award certainly is richly deserved," said Professor Anderson. "He is a young man of serious intellect and ambition, and I have high hopes that he will continue to grow into the kind of engineer that will stimulate controls systems research in academia, and in industry, in the future," he said.
