Center for Automation Research (CAR)

CAR is focused on research outcomes related to optimize productivity of processes, products, and services – with the use of control systems, machines, and information technologies – and to enable technologies for information generation, transformation, extraction, and interpretation.

Research Team

Research Programs

Health Care Automation

We are working in the area of e-health, specifically on bio-signal processing and analysis, computer-aided diagnosis and bioinformatics. These include (1) works related to the improvement of patient flow issues in hospitals and barangay health centers, e.g. real-time localization and state-of-health of patients in hospitals, as well as resource allocation in emergency rooms; (2) works related to monitoring of daily living activities, i.e. remote care of patients with disabilities and aging adults using various sensing technologies, e.g. CCTV; and, (3) works related to diagnostic laboratories, e.g. characterization of biomedical sensors for proper and efficient signal processing, design of signal processing circuits and systems for biomedical applications, automated karyotyping of chromosomes, image and video processing techniques related to visual diagnosis in MRI, ultrasound, EEG among others, automated infrared thermography for biomedical applications and acoustic sound processing techniques for various diagnostics.  These e-health-related efforts of CAR aim to contribute to the improvement of health care services in the country.

Smart City

Rapidly increasing urban population densities in the last decade has driven the need to enhance the quality and performance of urban services, particularly in the sectors of transport, emergency response, health care, and energy.  Metro Manila, with 13 million people, has eight (8) cities in the top 38 most densely populated in the world. Given this, CAR is levering its research and development efforts in the areas of traffic and road routing, parking, safety, emergency monitoring and response, vehicle automation as well as energy management optimization, to improve the quality of living within the areas of highest urbanization in the country.  Indeed, with ~43,000 people per square kilometer, the city of Manila has the highest population density in the world, we believe that whatever technologies we develop in our endeavors will be adaptable to other rapidly urbanizing cities, within the country and globally.

Rural Development Technologies

According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), more than one-third (1/3) of the population of the rural areas of the Philippines (where half the total population lives) are classified as living in poverty.  Among the causes of rural poverty are “a decline in the productivity and profitability of farming, smaller farm sizes and unsustainable practices that have led to deforestation and depleted fishing waters”.  CAR has made it part of its mission to work in the key areas of agricultural automation, environment monitoring, disaster monitoring and response, and sustainable energy.  With less focus on the theoretical, our goal is to produce immediately usable and practical small to medium-scale systems.

Research Projects

Research Area Description
Aerial Robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Submersible Vehicles Development of autonomous robotic systems for exploration and surveillance purposes
Agricultural Information Processing and Automation The use of sensor-fusion approaches to improve the growth of certain plants with cancer-fighting properties

Design of sugar cane maturity assessment systems
Energy, Environment, Health & Safety with Robotics and Automation The use of signal processing technologies to develop an electronic stethoscope to help identify pulmonary pathologies through a decision support system.
Risk Assessment, Reduction and Management Systems The Adarna Project: Design of a semi-autonomous helicopter system for aerial surveying, to be used for pre- and post-disaster response coordination.
Speech and Language Processing The development and use of language processing algorithms in detecting speech mispronunciations.