Queen Mary Centre for Undergraduate Research

The central aim of this project is to establish a centre to support undergraduate research activities.

Dynamics of swing pumping

This undergraduate summer internship project involves modelling a playground swing system as an elaborated pendulum to investigate the mechanism of frequently adopted swing pumping strategies that are used to increase the amplitude of swinging through the input of additional energy into the system. An example of this, is the standing pumping strategy in which the rider’s repeated standing-squatting motion causes a change in the rider’s position relative to the suspending rope, which in turn leads to an energy boost and gain in swing amplitude. The aim of this study is to construct a mathematical model to analyse the effect of the standing pumping strategy on the amplitude of oscillation using a combination of both analytical and computational methodologies, to better understand the dynamics of swing pumping.

Synchronisation of Complex Time-Delay Systems

Power Control of Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

Formation Control of Mobile Robots

This research addresses the problem of formation control of nonholonomic unicycle mobile robots. To solve the problem, we propose two distributed formation control algorithms supported by the virtual structure approach. Because the control of individual robots in the formation is based on local interactions between neighboring robots, …

Anticipating Synchronization of Chaotic Systems

In their ground breaking 1990 paper, Pecora and Carroll showed that, in spite of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, coupled chaotic systems can synchronize. Following this work, in the last decades considerable interest in the notion of synchronization of complex or chaotic systems has arisen. Among others, perhaps the main motivation …

Analysis and Control of Complex Time-Delay Systems