The University of Arizona’s Ricardo Sanfelice recently won an award that puts him among the best in the world when it comes to the highly analytical and mathematical design of control systems, which bring together disparate aspects of a system and make them work together.

“I was always intrigued by automation and excited about getting the systems to do what I wanted them to do rather than what they wanted to do.” Ricardo Sanfelice

Sanfelice, an assistant professor in the UA College of Engineering’s aerospace and mechanical engineering department, received the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics award for his contributions to the design of hybrid dynamical feedback controllers. His research is centered on smart grids and renewable energy and unmanned aircraft and vehicles.

The SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory prize is awarded every two years to a junior researcher across the globe. Sanfelice will receive the award in July 2013 in San Diego during the biennial SIAM Conference on Control Theory.

“I am very honored to be recognized by my peers with this award,” said Sanfelice.

An increasingly complex technological and automated world calls for more and more advanced and powerful control systems to deal with changes, uncertainties, and disturbances in systems that use feedback. Hybrid feedback controllers, grounded in mathematical theory and modeling, help predict what hybrid systems -- for example, temperature control, car cruise control, aircraft navigation, communication systems, and flow levels in water pumps -- will do in various circumstances, then determine corrections for the influences.

“Without feedback control many of the systems we have these days would be extremely difficult to operate,” said Sanfelice. “Feedback control is everywhere.”

Sanfelice and his research team are modeling ways to improve resiliency to changes in energy sources, conversion, load, and usage, thereby increasing reliability of electric power supply. Similarly, they are establishing ways to detect and avoid threats of hacking in unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Much of what we do on the theory side is grounded in what we do in the lab with very talented future engineers,” said Sanfelice, director of the UA College of Engineering’s Hybrid Dynamics and Control Laboratory.

Sanfelice joined the University in 2009 after earning a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and serving as postdoctoral associate at MIT. He has received a number of awards for his contributions to research and academics, including the National Science Foundation Career Award, the Air Force Young Investigator Research Award, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award, and a Higher Education Award for his contributions to STEM education.

“I was always intrigued by automation and excited about getting the systems to do what I wanted them to do rather than what they wanted to do,” said Sanfelice, who coauthored the 2012 book, Hybrid Dynamical Systems: Modeling, Stability and Robustness.