Two student competitions to help promote controls amongst University and high-school students during the 19th IFAC MMM Symposium

Two (2) student competitions, to help promote controls for both University and high-school students. To ensure equity and diversity amongst participants for both challenges, we will request that teams be comprised of at least one member who is either a woman or part of a visible minority.

Organiser: 

Dr. Carole Prévost, BBA, carole.prevost@bba.ca, IFAC MMM 2022 Industry Vice-Chair

Sponsoring IFAC Body: 

TC6.2 on Minerals, Metals processing and Mining

Description:

We are presently organizing two (2) student competitions, to help promote controls for both University and high-school students. To ensure equity and diversity amongst participants for both challenges, we will request that teams be comprised of at least one member who is either a woman or part of a visible minority.
University-level competition
The first competition would be aimed at University level students (both graduate & undergraduate students). The purpose of this competition is to encourage University students to pursue careers in the field of automation and controls, for the mining industry. The students would compete, either in teams or individually, to design the best controller for a comminution circuit. The “process” will be coded in Matlab, using the equipment models developed by Prof. Jocelyn Bouchard and Prof. André Desbiens at Laval University in Canada. Participants will be asked to design a controller that adheres to predefined criteria, and then simulate and test their controller performance in the Matlab environment, using the models developed at Université Laval.
A functional description of the process will be provided on the conference website, along with the problem definition. Participants will gain access to the process simulator via a virtual machine, on which a trial version of Matlab and all the necessary toolboxes and functions needed to code their controller will be installed. Participants will have the liberty to propose any type of controller (PID, MPC, Fuzzy logic, AI, etc..) which provides a valid solution to the problem defined.
The competition would be hosted for 2 weeks, from March 7th to 18h, 2022. Participants would be asked to prepare a 30-minute presentation of their proposed solution, defending their choice of controller, and detailing the controller architecture developed. A virtual meeting would then be held with jury members (3 individuals) between May 9th to May 20th, where participants will have to answer questions and host a live demonstration of the controller performance in simulation. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place contest winners would receive cash prizes and an invitation (with possible compensation for travel) to present their solutions at the conference on August 15th to 18th, 2022.
High School-level workshop & competition
The second competition would be aimed at high school level student (10-15 years of age). The purpose of this competition is to stimulate young students’ interest in controls and encourage them to consider a career in engineering. The idea would be to first host a workshop, then getting the participants to compete to solve a simple problem by applying the concepts learned during the workshop. Getting individuals from this age group to participate in such a competition is much more difficult, as many of them have not yet been introduced to the field of automation and control. For this reason, we would like to rehost the IFAC 2020 Girls in Controls Workshop hosted during the 21st IFAC World Congress, since the technical bugs related to this challenge have already been ironed out. This would allow us to invest our time and efforts in promoting the event, which in our opinion, is essential in ensuring its success.
The workshop consists of using Scratch to implement a first controller for an automated game of the participant’s design. The workshop is to be hosted virtually. All the information required to rehost the event is provided on the following website:
https://www.ifac-control.org/areas/girls-in-control-gic-workshop-and-material
The package includes an advertisement flyer, instructions on how to use Scratch, as well as videos covering the basic control principles.
The workshop would be hosted virtually for 1-2 days, on the last week of May 2022. At the end of the day, participants will be asked to demonstrate their automated game, and answer questions related to their design. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place contest winners would receive cash prizes.