Dr. Shankar Bhattacharyya was one of the invited distinguished speakers to deliver a keynote address at the 2017 National Congress of Automatic Control, jointly organized by the Mexican Association of Automatic Control and the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, Mexico.
Bhattacharyya is the Robert M. Kennedy '26 Professor II in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He studies automatic control systems and theory and applications of robust stability.
Bhattacharya’s presentation described a modern approach and recent results on multiobjective classical control design methods developed at Texas A&M, and historical reasons for the recent upsurge of interest in classical controllers.
“It turns out that these controllers, rather than high order modern controllers, account for 99 percent of controllers in use in diverse traditional industries, such as robotics, aerospace controls and biomedical engineering,” said Bhattacharyya. “In fact, they are also the controllers of choice in driverless cars and unmanned aerial vehicles as well.”
Bhattacharyya also demonstrated how recent single-input single-output results in classical control can now be extended to multivariable systems.
Bhattacharyya’s awards and honors include National Academy of Sciences- NASA Research Associate (1974-75), IEEE Fellow (1989), International Federation of Automatic Control Fellow (2011), Boeing-Welliver Faculty Fellow (1999), Foreign Member of Brazilian Academy of Sciences (2011), Foreign Member of Brazilian Academy of Engineering (2016) and Professor Visitante Especial by the Brazilian Research Council (2014-17). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation for 34 years and also through the Qatar National Research Fund, National Instruments and the Brazilian Research Council.