Raffaello D'Andrea, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Program grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The value of the grant is $200,000 over four years.
D'Andrea is perhaps best known for his leadership of the Cornell "Big Red" team that won the Robot World Cup Initiative, familiarly known as RoboCup, in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1999. The annual event is a competition between teams of tiny but incredibly sophisticated robot "soccer players." D'Andrea again will be the project manager and faculty adviser when the team defends its title in August in Melbourne, Australia.
The NSF award will support D'Andrea's research into developing new tools and techniques for controlling the complex behavior that exists in large, interconnected systems, such as automated highways and aircraft and satellite flight formations. The bulk of the research deals with developing tools and techniques for control analysis and design for the large class of systems that comprise many similar, locally interconnected units.
D'Andrea was educated at the University of Toronto (B.Sc., engineering physics, 1991) and the California Institute of Technology (M.S., electrical engineering, 1992; Ph.D., electrical engineering, 1996). He joined the Cornell faculty in 1997. Last year he was awarded the D.G. Shepherd Teaching Prize, awarded annually to the most outstanding teacher in the Sibley school.
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