Professor Wen-Hua Chen

FIEEE CEng FIMechE FIET

  • Professor in Autonomous Vehicles
  • EPSRC Established Career Fellow
  • Undergraduate Admissions Tutor
Publications
Google Scholar
headshot of Wen-Hua in a church

Background

Wen-Hua obtained his BEng in Industrial Automation from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Jiangsu University in 1986 and subsequently his MSc and PhD in Control Engineering from the Department of Automatic Control at Northeastern University, China, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He worked as a Lecturer and Associate Professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China from 1991 and from 1997, and served as the Head of Division in Control Theory and Applications. He was a Research Associate (affiliated with Department of Mechanical Engineering) and then Lecturer (affiliated with Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering) in the Centre for Systems and control at the University of Glasgow, Scotland between 1997 and 2000. In the end of 2000, Wen-Hua joined the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University as a Lecturer and subsequently Senior Lecturer in Flight Control Systems. In 2012, Wen-Hua was appointed to the Chair in Autonomous Vehicles. He set up Loughborough Centre for Autonomous Systems and Control in 2012 and developed it into a centre of a significant international profile. He is now mainly interested in the development and application of autonomous system technologies in a wide range of areas from aerospace, automotive to agriculture, environment monitoring and disaster/emergency managements.

Qualifications:

  • BEng in Industrial Automation, Jiangsu University, 1986
  • MSc in Control Engineering (Thesis: Intelligent control of Electrode Systems of Arc Furnaces), Northeastern University, 1989
  • PhD in Control Engineering (Thesis: Robust control of dynamic systems in the presence of disturbance and parametric uncertainties using game theory), Northeastern University, 1991
  • Chartered Engineer (CEng) 2015
  • Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (FIMechE) 2015
  • Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) 2013
  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2018
  • Fellow of the High Education Academy, UK (FHEA) 2003

Key awards and accomplishments:

  • Award of EPSRC Established Career Fellowship (2020-2025)
  • Participated or coordinated research projects with a total budget of £10M
  • Published more than 350 papers in international journal and conferences attracting more than 20,000 citations
  • Author of the most popular paper on Automatica in 2003
  • Elected as “Changjiang Scholar” by the Ministry of Education of China in 2014
  • Attracted fund supporting research from EPSRC, STFC, BAE Systems, Thales, the European Space Agency and Royal Society
  • Charles Shape Beecher Prize from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2013
  • Loughborough Excellence Awards for Developing Research Leadership, 2013
  • Best Paper Award of Unmanned Systems in 2020-2021

Current teaching responsibilities:

  • Delivery of selected lectures and seminars benefitting from specialist research knowledge

Current administrative responsibilities:

  • Leader of Control and Reliability Research Group
  • Head of Loughborough University Centre for Autonomous Systems (LUCAS)
  • Core member of the EPSRC/Dstl University Defence Research Collaborations (UDRC)

Outline of main research interests: 

  • The development of fundamental control theory for highly automated systems: Driven by the need to move from low levels to high levels of automation and the wide applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, a Goal-Oriented Control Systems (GOCS) framework has been proposed to develop generic and fundamental theories to ensure safety and performance in the design and deployment of this type of autonomous and intelligent systems. It also aims to develop effective and efficient tools for the analysis and design of autonomous systems in a similar way as the current control theory for low-level, automatic control systems.
  • The development of advanced control theory and its applications: Significant original contributions have been made in nonlinear control and robust control, particularly in the development of disturbance observer-based control techniques (DOBC) for nonlinear systems under disturbance and(or) uncertainty, and model predictive control (MPC) of nonlinear systems. Applications are focused on flight control of helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and spacecraft.
  • Signal processing: Computer vision, data fusion, tracking with GMTI radar, multiple target tracking, Bayesian estimation, particle filtering techniques, and real-time signal processing with the help of domain knowledge/world models.
  • Development of autonomous system technologies: Autopilot, navigation, data and information fusion, collision avoidance, path planning, mission planning, conditional and health monitoring, situational awareness, decision making under uncertainty, autonomous taxiing, terminal area operation of unmanned aircraft, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), system integration, and flight tests.
  • Application of autonomous system technologies: A wide range of applications of autonomous system/vehicle technologies have been researched particularly in agriculture and environment monitoring. Water management, weed management, pest and disease monitoring, chemical, biological and radiation substance monitoring/search, communication relay with UAVs, and disaster and emergency management.
  • Safety and verification and validation of autonomous system technologies: Safety is embedded in the core heart of our research, particularly for the operation of autonomous vehicles in public domains. Research in this area consists of two directions: the development of safety functions for autonomous vehicles or other vehicles, and the development of efficient verification and validation technologies for autonomous functions. For the former, active contingency management such as autonomous forced landing techniques has been developed with BAE Systems. For the latter, automatic worst-case search and reachability analysis are the main techniques developed.

Grants and contracts

Major grants:

  • Goal-Oriented Control Systems (GOCS): Disturbance, Uncertainty and Constraints. EPSRC. EP/T005734/1. £1.6M. 02/2020-01/2025. Principal Investigator.
  • Enabling wide area persistent remote sensing for agriculture applications through developing and coordinating heterogeneous platforms. Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Newton Fund. ST/N006852/1, £1.5M. 01/05/2016-31/12/2019. PI.
  • Signal Processing Solutions for the Networked Battle Space. £3.67M, EPSRC/Dstl (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory). UDRC (University Defence Research Centre), EP/K014307/1. 01/04/2013-30/06/2018. Co-investigator.
  • Towards More Autonomy for Unmanned Vehicles: Situational Awareness and Decision Making under Uncertainty. EPSRC. EP/J011525/1. 01/03/2012--30/12/2016. £1M, Principal Investigator.
  • Industrial Robots-as-a-Service (IRaaS) - Resilient and responsive manufacturing systems enabled by rapidly deployable mobile robots. EPSRC. EP/V050966/1. £1.45M. 01/07/2021-30/09/2025. Co-Investigator

Small grants:

  • Disturbance observer-based control for a Compound Rotorcraft. $400K. Korea Agency for Defence Development. 2020-2021
  • Space-enabled Crop disEase maNagement sErvice via Crop sprAying Drones (SCENE-CAD). STFC ST/V00137X/1.  £400K. 1/03/2020-28/02/2022
  • Utilizing Earth Observation and UAV technologies to deliver pest and disease products and services to end users in China. Innovate UK 99669-583179. BB/S020977/1. £1M, CoI (PI: CABI), 02/2019-01.2022
  • Autonomous Search for Chemical Release with a Pocket-sized Drone [SceneSEARCH], Phase I and II Autonomy in Hazardous Scene Assessment, Dstl, 01/10/2016-30/09/2018

Outline of research vision and background

Wen-Hua Chen Article - IEEE Control systems magazine 2018

Sustainable Agriculture with Autonomous System Technologies

Recently I have developed a strong interest in applying autonomous system technologies in tackling global challenges such as food security and environment protection. I have been leading an international team working on the development of remote sensing and spraying for agriculture applications using unmanned aircraft systems and other robotics and autonomous technologies. My team works very closely with partners from CABI, Manchester, Cranfield, East Mailing Research of NIAB, King’s College and Bluebear Research in the UK, Northwest University of Agriculture & Forestry, the Digital Earth and Remote Sensing Institute of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing University, Jiangsu University and others in China, and other partners in India and Africa. So far, 7 projects with a total budget of over £3M have been secured from STFC, BBSRC, and Innovate UK. These projects are aimed to support precision agriculture in the UK, China and other countries so as to reduce the use of resources (e.g. water, land) and the environmental impact of using fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides by providing real-time site-specific information and targeted variable rate of treatment and crop management using remote sensing and automated spraying technologies. The technologies can find a wide range of applications in other developed countries (e.g. wild animal monitoring, and environment protection).

Autonomous system technologies also provide a promising solution for dealing with agriculture challenges faced in developing countries such as the shortage of seasonal labours. Watch our future smart agriculture video, courtesy of my PhD student Tianxing Zhang.

Autonomous Airborne Hazard Material Search and Monitoring

Hazardous material detection, source search and coverage monitoring are important for many applications; for example, air quality monitoring, accidentally released hazardous substances, disaster management, and anti-terrorism. Watch our autonomous search systems video of an explanation of our motivation and the theoretic algorithms, courtesy of my PhD student Michael Hutchinson.

We have conducted the world's first experimental tests of cognitive search of chemical sources, watch our field trials video of our unmanned aerial vehicle-based autonomous gas leakage search systems.

Recent publications

  • J Su, X Zhu, S Li, W-H Chen (2023), AI meets UAVs: a survey on AI empowered UAV perception systems for precision agriculture. Neurocomputing. Vol. 518, pp.242-270.
  • S Zhan, WJB Midgley, W-H Chen, T Steffen (2023). An offline closed-form optimal predictive power management strategy for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. Vol. 31, No. 2, pp: 543-554.
  • W-H Chen (2022). Perspective View of Autonomous Control in Unknown Environment: Dual Control for Exploitation and Exploration vs Reinforcement Learning. Neurocomputing. Vol.497, pp.50-63.
  • X Fang, J Jiang, W-H Chen (2022). Model Predictive Control with Wind Preview for Aircraft Forced Landing. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2023.3235321.
  • Z Li, W-H Chen, J Yang (2022). Concurrent Learning Based Dual Control for Exploration and Exploitation in Autonomous Search of airborne hazard, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.  10.1109/TAC.2022.3221907. 

Selected publications

  • W-H Chen (2022). Perspective View of Autonomous Control in Unknown Environment: Dual Control for Exploitation and Exploration vs Reinforcement Learning. Neurocomputing. Vol.497, pp.50-63.
  • W-H Chen (2022). Stability of Finite Horizon Optimisation based Control without Terminal Weight. International Journal of System Science. Vol. 53, No.16, pp.3524-3537.
  • W-H Chen, C Rhode and C Liu (2021). Dual control for exploration and exploitation in autonomous search. Automatica. Vol.133, No.11, 109851. doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2021.109851.
  • D Yi, J Su, L Hu, C Liu, M Quddus, M Dianati and W-H Chen (2020). Implicit Personalization in Driving Assistance: State-of-the-Art and Open Issues. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. Vol. 5, No.3, pp.397-413.
  • J Su and W-H Chen (2019). Model-Based Fault Diagnosis System Verification Using Reachability Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems. Vol.49, No.4, pp.742 – 751.

 View central admin publications database

External collaborators:

  • BAE Systems
  • Swarm Systems
  • Roke Manor
  • Dstl
  • Cranfield University
  • Manchester University
  • Surrey University
  • Cardiff University
  • Strathclyde University
  • Newcastle University
  • Jiangsu University
  • Southeast University

External roles and appointments:

  • Visiting Professor at Jiangsu University (2017-)
  • Member of EPSRC Peer Review College (2016-)
  • Member of Steering Committee of EPSRC Network in Verification and Validation of Autonomous Systems (2016-)
  • Associate Editor or member of editorial board: Industrial Artificial Intelligence. Springer ( 2022-); IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (2019-); Unmanned Systems (2016-);  Systems Science & Control Engineering. Taylor and Francis (2026-).
  • Member of IEEE Technical Committee on Aerospace Control.
  • Member of Autonomous Systems National Technical Committee, technology strategic board.
  • Advisory roles: Panel member for EU Framework Programme projects; Research proposal reviewer for The Israel Science Foundation, Romania National Council for Development and Innovation, and the Ministry of Education of China; Proposal reviewer for the Royal Society and the UK Space Agency
  • International conference organisation: Involved in organising about 30 international conferences in the last 5 years (e.g.  General Chair, IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics. Loughborough, March, 2023; .Associate Editor, the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS). June 4-7, 2024, Crete, Greece; Member of IPC, The 35th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) (IEEE IV 2024), June 2-5, 2024, Jeju Island, Korea, and  IEEE International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference (IAVVC 2023), Austin, USA;  Track Chair, IEEE International Conference on Industrial Electronics (IECON), 2023, Singapore.)
  • Invited lectures: Invited talks in UK universities (e.g. Cambridge University, Sheffield, Oxford, Warwick, Southampton, Liverpool, and Lancaster), and international universities (e.g. University of Tokyo, Tokyo University of Technology, Keio University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beihang University, Southeast University, Northeastern and Jiangsu).
  • Regular Reviewer for all the major journals in control engineering including Automatica; ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control; European Journal of Control; International Journal of Control; Proceedings of IMechE: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering; International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control; IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technologies; IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEE Proceedings Part-D: Control Theory and Applications; International Journal of Systems Science; IEEE/ASME Transactions of Mechatronics; IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, Control Engineering Practice
  • Collaborative Research: closely work with BAE Systems and the European Space Agency (ESA).
  • Member of UK Research and Innovation Talent Peer Review College (PRC) (7/02/2023-)