成功的Cover Letters – Nonholonomic

从找资料… 到起稿… 到归纳… 到看n种不同的cover letters的写法… 到整理… 到改grammar… 到proof-read n次… 前后大概一封花2-3天的时间吧. Cover Letter还是不容易写的, 还是不错的payoff的.

给John Wen的:

I am writing to you to seek for the opportunity to work with you as a postdoctoral researcher. I am currently a graduate student in University at Buffalo and expected to receive my PhD degree by this September. The topic of my dissertation is “Design and Control framework for Cooperative Mobile Manipulator Collectives”, and my academic advisor is Professor Venkat Krovi. My research interest lies in the span of distributed multi-agent robotic system, analysis of parallel mechanisms, and control of mobile and locomotion systems.

In my graduate research work, I have been involving in the development of theoretical and implementation framework to achieve cooperative payload transport and manipulation by multiple mobile manipulators. Interest in such cooperative systems typically arises when certain tasks are either too complex to be performed by a single agent (such as carrying a huge container), or when there are distinct benefits in terms of redundancy, robustness and reliability that accrue by many simple cooperative robotic modules. However, the mechanical capability of both the individual modules as well as their interactions can significantly affect the overall system performance. Hence, in the design context, I developed the system-level models to systematically analyze the role of mixture of holonomic/nonholonomic constraints and active/passive/locked joints in affecting the collective performance in terms of feasibility, singularity, manipulability, controllability and disturbance rejection capability. On the other hand, in the control context, the proposed architecture permits natural decentralization in terms of kinematic control. This leverages the development of bi-level hierarchical control implementation that combines the upper-level planning of the kinematically compatible desired trajectories and the lower-level posture stabilization controller to accommodate, detect and correct for configuration errors. Finally, in the validation context, we employed the hardware-in-the-loop experimentation within the MATLAB/Simulink/xPC Target framework, which can potentially be extended to the future teleoperation-based deployment.

My long-term career goal is to obtain a faculty position in a research university. To this end, I believe that with the collaboration with you, I can further enhance my analysis framework for the cooperative robotics to a more general setting to establish a more solid research program. Specifically, as noted in some of your prior publications, due to the tight physical contact between multiple manipulators over the payload, there is a need to carefully analyze the required “information flow” between the agents (in this case, the “information” is the transmission of motion and internal forces) to achieve consensus collaborations. Furthermore, if the system is being teleoperated, the teleoperator can be analyzed as an additional agent with different behavior, but now the information flow between the systems would be the wired or wireless Ethernet-based network flow. Issues such as packet loss and time delay can then further critically affect the performance of such framework. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in the decentralization of control schemes among multiple (human and robot) agents to achieve consensus centralized goal though minimal interaction/communication. My research plan is to establish better understanding and systematic analysis to such robot-robot and human-robot interacting behaviors over different modes of networked flow/interaction, and ultimately provide theoretical guidelines to develop better decentralized controllers. I believe that subsets of the above research theme and developed experience would be relevant to your current active research programs, especially in the work in networked distributed/cooperative control systems.

Finally, although my dissertation work focuses on cooperation between multiple mobile manipulators, I have also been explored to knowledge in various fields throughout my graduate studies. I involved in attacking some other issues related to the abovementioned research topic in the form of collaboration with other labs. They include the development of differential flatness-based kinematic and dynamic control for a mobile manipulator (with Professor Sunil Agrawal at University of Delaware), and the evaluation of various real-time distributed simulation schemes for multibody dynamics with closed structure (with Waseem Khan at McGill University). I also have general knowledge in differential geometry, numerical analysis, parallel computation and optimal control. Furthermore, I possess teaching experience in the broad area of control systems, mechanism analysis and synthesis, mechatronics and computer aided design/engineering, where in some cases I was the instructor of the courses. I believe that my future postdoctoral researcher experience with Center for Automation Technologies and Systems in RPI will provide me more valuable opportunity to continue to work with great researchers to tackle more challenging multidisciplinary engineering problems.

I have enclosed a copy of my curriculum vitae and the names and contact information of the references. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need further information. I will certainly respond to you as soon as possible. I appreciate your time in reviewing my applications. I look forward to hearing from you.

给Mark Spong的:

My research interest lies in the span of distributed multi-agent robotic system, analysis of parallel mechanisms, and control of mobile/locomotion systems. In my graduate research work, I have been involving in the development of theoretical and implementation framework to achieve cooperative payload transport and manipulation by multiple mobile manipulators. Interest in such cooperative systems typically arises when certain tasks are either too complex to be performed by a single agent (such as carrying a huge container), or when there are distinct benefits in terms of redundancy, robustness and reliability that accrue by many simple cooperative robotic modules. However, the mechanical capability of both the individual modules as well as their interactions can significantly affect the overall system performance. Hence, in the design context, we developed system-level models to systematically analyze the role of mixture of holonomic/nonholonomic constraints and active/passive/locked joints in affecting the collective performance in terms of feasibility, singularity, manipulability, controllability and disturbance rejection capability. On the other hand, in the control context, the proposed architecture permits natural decentralization in terms of kinematic control. This leverages the development of bi-level hierarchical control implementation that combines the upper-level planning of the kinematically compatible desired trajectories and the lower-level posture stabilization controller to accommodate, detect and correct for configuration errors. Finally, in the validation context, we employed the hardware-in-the-loop real-time experimentation within the MATLAB/Simulink/xPC Target framework, which can potentially be extended to the future teleoperation-based deployment.

My long-term career goal is to obtain a faculty position in a research university. To this end, I believe that, with the collaboration with you, I can further extend the above analysis framework to a more established research program, especially in involving human operator in the loop to realize remote semi-autonomous teleoperation/telemanipulation. As noted in some of your prior publications, such implementation is very attractive yet challenging since the communication between human operator and robots, and the coordination and synchronization between the robots are the key issues to affect the performance and stability of the overall cooperative system. My research plan is to treat the robots and human operator as individual agents, and unify their interactions and required control actions based on their varying grades of communication limitation in a networked framework. Such requirements can be categorized based on (a) tight cooperation, (b) loose cooperation and (c) teleoperation, each required different control schema for coordination and synchronization, but potentially using the same networked architecture. The first case corresponds to the situation when all the robots are attached to the common payload, and the information (in the form of motion and/or forces) from any agent can be immediately transmitted from one to another through the payload due to their physically tight attachment (given that the payload is rigid). Hence, their control actions can be straight-forward without delay and information loss. The second case corresponds to the situation when the robots are not attached to the payload, and the robots require some form of communication protocol (wirelessly through centralized supervisor/leader) and/or sensors (ranging/bearing sensors, omnidirectional camera, GPS, etc.) to identify each other’s actions. Hence, the coordination and synchronization process in this case would require more careful control strategies that take into account the moderate delay and information loss. In the final case, the interaction between the human operator and the robots are more distant as compared to the second case, and hence experiencing significant delay and information loss. Furthermore, the input command and (force) feedback are quite different from the first two cases. Hence, my plan is to establish better understanding and systematic analysis to such robot-robot and human-robot interacting behaviors over different modes of networked interaction to ultimately provide theoretical guidelines to develop better decentralized controllers through minimal interaction and guaranteed stability. Most of your prior work has built the foundation to explore the above possible research avenue.

I believe that subsets of the above research theme and developed experience would be relevant to your current active research programs. I also believe that my future postdoctoral researcher experience with you and your co-workers in University of Texas at Dallas will provide me valuable opportunities to tackle more challenging multidisciplinary engineering problems.

给CSU的:

I am writing to you to express my interest in applying for the full-time lecturer position advertised in the Summer 2008 issue of the ASEE PRISM Magazine. I am currently a graduate student in University at Buffalo and expected to receive my PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering by this August. I believe that my extensive teaching experience in mechanical engineering, specialized in controls, robotics/mechanisms and computer aided design/engineering, and my research experience in the design and control of cooperative mobile manipulator collectives have provided me with the background necessary to make me a strong candidate for the lecturer position.

As shown in my curriculum vitae, I have given excellent opportunities to be an instructor for 2 semesters to teach both undergraduate and graduate level courses during my graduate studies. I was given full responsibility to design and organize the course structure to meet the syllabus need. I used the online course management system effectively not only to post lecture notes and assignments, but also interact with the students using the forum-based discussion board in interactive and collaborative manner. I also successfully implemented several game-based group-learning teaching methodologies in the class to allow the students to learn fast and play the role as a team member. I find that, to effectively teach students in mechanical engineering, it is vital to illustrate real application examples in the lecture so they can remember forever, and to enhance the interactions between students and instructor both inside and outside the classroom.

I have also given opportunities to be a teaching assistant for 6 semesters, where I worked closely with the professors and other teaching assistants as a teaching “team”. When teaching System Analysis, I not only teach in the hands-on lab course to introduce the students to the transient dynamics of mechanical systems in different domain, I also took the role as a “Head TA” to lead other junior TA’s to get up to speed to teach in different sections. I also taught more advanced control courses in Digital Control and Mechatronics, where the students implemented computer and microcontroller to control various electromechanical systems – allowing me to design and setup the laboratory equipments independently. I also taught Machines and Mechanism course, and co-developed an online tutorial that allows students to learn virtual prototyping skills at their own pace. The results of the tutorial was published in both conference and journal articles. Finally, I was also invited to give multiple lectures on numerical methods in the course in robotics, and to give multiple presentations on robotics and mechatronics in various high school workshops. I believe the above cumulated multi-disciplinary experience will be valuable as a successful lecturer.

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