The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.  IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement.

Professor Chen, pictured left, stated:

“Good research may take many years to be recognised. In addressing the performance degradation caused by friction in robotic manipulators, I pioneered a nonlinear disturbance observer design technique in 1998 when working at the University of Glasgow as a Research Associate. This technique was then generalised and further developed for a wide range of nonlinear systems through my EPSRC first grant and other works. However, it was quite difficult to get papers published and the techniques accepted in the academic and industrial community at the beginning. I am very pleased that after 18 years my original contribution was recognised.”

Nonlinear Disturbance Observer Based Control (DOBC) is now widely accepted by the control community in many industrial sectors, including aerospace, electric motor driving systems, power electronics, and robotics. For example, it has been applied to improve flight stability of helicopters and path following performance of aircraft in the presence of gust by Prof Chen’s team. Prof Wen-Hua Chen’s work in this area has attracted more than 3,500 citations according to Google Scholars.

In addition to his substantial contributions to the development and application of advanced control theory, Prof Chen also made significant contributions to signal processing, unmanned aerial vehicles, and autonomous systems. He is now working on developing autonomous system technologies for addressing global challenges, particularly in agriculture and environment protection     

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The School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering offers their congratulations to Professor Chen in recognition of this prestigious honour.

(Top photograph: Prof Cen's Research Team testing disturbance observer based control techniques on unmanned aerial vehicles for a Defence Science and Technology Laboratory sponsored project)