ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka Receives AACC’s Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award

ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka is the recipient of the 2018 American Automatic Control Council’s AACC’s Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. He accepted the award at the American Control Conference ACC Awards Ceremony in Milwaukee on June 28, 2018.

The Bellman Award is given for distinguished career contributions to the theory or application of automatic control and it is the highest recognition of professional achievement for US control systems engineers and scientists. Professor Tomizuka was recognized for his seminal and pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of mechatronic systems control. A video of the award presentation can be found on the department’s YouTube page.

Professor Tomizuka is a pioneering and a towering figure in the field of mechatronics and the control of mechanical systems. He has published over 239 articles in refereed archival journals and 478 articles in referred conference proceedings in a wide variety of theory and application areas. Tomizuka’s trademark is bridging the gap between control theory and its implementation, through the mechatronics approach, by formulating and solving important problems in diverse application areas such as robotics, machining, manufacturing, computer disk drives, and intelligent vehicles and highway systems, while often developing and introducing innovative, mathematically rigorous and technologically useful control algorithms. His contributions in finite preview optimal and feedforward control, repetitive and iterative learning control, adaptive and non-linear control, and their synergistic integration, have for the most part been engendered in the solution of engineering problems, and have found a broad range of applications. Professor Tomizuka is a consummate research advisor and lifelong mentor, who has not only supervised and trained a stunningly large number of outstanding control faculty and professionals he has supervised well over 100 Ph.D. students to completion, but has also inspired and influenced an entire generation of mechanical and control engineering students, faculty and practitioners.

Also pictured in the above photograph left is ME Alum Andrew G. Alleyne M.S ’92, Ph.D. ’94. Alleyne received the AACC’s Control Engineering Practice Award for pioneering contributions to modeling, simulation and control of dynamic thermal systems, and their applications in aerospace, automotive and building control industries.