My research many years ago, when I was still a graduate student (1975-1982), was in Control Systems. My M.Sc thesis studied stability of power systems. My PhD dissertation was in the field of Nonlinear Filtering and dealt with Failure Detection and Diagnosis problems using system models with randomly jumping coefficients.

What attracted me to Florida Atlantic University back in 1982, besides being a young university amidst a tremendous growth, was IBM Boca Raton, and its Robotics and Automation Center which served IBM world-wide. For controls folks like me the opportunity to do robotics research was like heaven. Thanks to the outstanding good neighbor relationship between IBM and FAU (and much credit is due to Ray Floyd of IBM and Dr. Yacov Shamash my department chair) I had the distinct honor of spending the entire 1985 year at Dr. Neal Alewine’s group at IBM sharing an office  with and learning a lot from two more visiting professors who were phenomenal robotics researchers – Dr. Ben Mooring (who at the time was at Texas A&M) and Dr. Bahram Ravani (who at the time was at the University of Wisconsin). During that year many issues associated with Robot Calibration, which at that time was a new research field, became better formulated. For the next 15 years it became my main research area, as evidenced by two books (listed further down below on this page).

From 1985-1993 I served as Director of the FAU Robotics Center. The center enjoyed State of Florida funding which allowed us to hire several new faculty, support many graduate students and create a showcase robotics lab. In 1993, upon being elected as chairman of the FAU Electrical Engineering department I passed the Robotics Center baton to my colleague Dr. Oren Masory. Over the years the center graduated 30 PhD students, many of whom became very successful in their industry or academic career.

Like many things in life, there are ups and there are downs. Sadly there is no more an FAU Robotics Center nor a Robotics Lab. In the last decade I found myself returning to various aspects of Control Systems research. I particularly became involved in creating the FAU Bioengineering program which translated to several interesting control research topics. This part of the page focuses on my more recent research activities.