News & Events

Stalking vampires of the Great Lakes: Smart e-skin technology for monitoring invasive sea lamprey

Xiaobo Tan, Professor, Michigan State University

1400 Wegmans Hall

Sea lamprey, a “vampire fish”, is an invasive species in the Great Lakes region that threatens its ecosystems and billion-dollar fisheries. Sea lamprey uses suctorial mouth to prey on various host fish by attaching to the fish and draining its body fluids. In this talk we share our effort in developing electronic skins (e-skins) for detecting the suctorial attachment by adult sea lampreys during their upstream migration for spawning. Such e-skins can be mounted at strategically chosen places, such as selective fishways, to facilitate measures (e.g., capture and population assessment) for sea lamprey control. We discuss two e-skin technologies that have been developed. In one approach soft pressure sensor arrays capture the pressure profile generated by lamprey suction. Regularized least-square algorithms are proposed for mitigating the crosstalk in the resistor network of the sensor array, to properly reconstruct the pressure profile. Machine learning is further adopted to automate the lamprey detection process, as verified with data from animal experiments. In the second approach an interdigitated electrode panel captures the impedance change when a lamprey mouth is attached. The sensor output is used to train several classifier models, which are implemented on an Arduino microcontroller platform and have demonstrated the capability of real-time lamprey detection.   

Dr. Xiaobo Tan is an MSU Foundation Professor and the Richard M. Hong Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in automatic control from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995, 1998, respectively, and his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland in 2002. His research interests include underwater robotics, soft robotics, smart materials, and control systems. He has published over 300 papers and been awarded six US patents in these areas. Dr. Tan is a Fellow of IEEE and ASME. He was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2006), MSU Teacher-Scholar Award (2010), MSU College of Engineering Withrow Distinguished Scholar Award (2018), Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Maryland (2018), MSU William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award, and multiple best paper awards. Dr. Tan is keen to integrate his research with educational and outreach activities, and has served as the PI of an NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program focused on water sustainability and equity (2023-2028), Director of an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site program (2009 – 2016), and Curator of a robotic fish exhibit at MSU Museum (2016-2017). He has served the professional community in different capacities, including being a member of ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division’s Executive Committee, and the general chair of 2018 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference and 2023 American Control Conference. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief-elect for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

Refreshments will be provided.