Researchers at WMU seek solutions that could allow machine-driven systems to self-heal

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—Imagine that your car or a manufacturing robot on a production line encounters an unexpected system failure and can resolve the issue itself—or better yet, your car or the robot identifies the issue and can resolve it before it even becomes a problem. A $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help researchers at Western Michigan University find solutions just like this. 

"This is highly transformative in terms of research as no one has investigated this approach. It is high risk, high reward,” says principal investigator Dr. Sandun Kuruppu, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

With funding from the grant, the team is developing innovative self-characterizing and self-healing approaches for electromechanical energy conversion systems, which convert electrical energy into mechanical power. The team will investigate approaches that could lead to this transformative field of research allowing machine-driven systems to self-heal under fault conditions and self-characterize throughout the life cycle for optimized performance. 

"Being at the forefront of this groundbreaking research is an honor, as it holds immense potential to create reliable electromechanical systems. This work also closely aligns with the NSF's mission of driving scientific progress and enhancing our nation’s capacity to tackle current and future challenges," says Dr. Steve Butt, dean of WMU’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Led by Kuruppu, WMU graduate student Ramitha Dissanayake and one undergraduate research student will also be working on the project.

The approaches investigated as part of this grant could lead to benefits for both consumers and industry. Electromechanical energy conversion is present in many things people use every day, such as electric vehicle powertrains, electric steering systems, steering systems in autonomous cars, washing machines and elevators. The technology being investigated as part of this project could also be applied to robots in a manufacturing environment, allowing manufacturing to continue uninterrupted by correcting failures before they impact production schedules.

“Electromechanical energy conversion has become very common in our day-to-day lives; however, they still consist of components that could fail, leading to catastrophic outcomes such as harm to users and damage to property,” says Kuruppu. “Existing fault diagnosis approaches for the most part observe signals and system characteristics to identify a fault (passive), whereas the significance of this project and approach is that it intentionally perturbs the system to see if the system can be further optimized or heal any faults that may emerge.”

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