Dept. of Mechanical Engineering - Grad Seminar

PRESENTATION: The current manufacturing paradigm is shifting toward production systems that demand significantly greater flexibility and adaptability. To achieve this objective, new system-level control strategies must be developed to control and coordinate different components on the shop floor. In this talk, I will present our recent approaches to enhance flexibility and adaptability of manufacturing systems across multiple layers of automation. I will begin by introducing our work on leveraging artificial intelligence to improve automation–operator interaction, enabling more intuitive, intelligent, and resilient human–machine collaboration. Building on these results, I will then discuss how we generalize these concepts to the system level, focusing on the development of dynamic models and control frameworks that enhance cooperation, coordination, and overall system performance. Case studies from both simulated environments and operational testbeds will highlight how these methods can be applied to realize the next generation of intelligent, interconnected, and highly responsive factories of the future.

PRESENTER: Ilya Kovalenko is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State University. He received both his PhD in Mechanical Engineering (2020) and his MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan (2018), and his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2015). He was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2016 and the NSF CAREER award in 2025. His current research interests lie in the areas of control theory, artificial intelligence, and smart manufacturing, with a focus on cooperative control, cyber-physical systems, and robotics.