Department/College/UnitBaskin School of Engineering

TitleProfessor

AffiliationFaculty

Web SiteUCSC
Autonomous
SLUGS

Primary Office LocationEngineering Building 2
337-B

Office HoursFridays 9am-noon and by appointment

Mail StopSOE3

Biography, Education and Training

• I was born in Sousse, Tunisia. I spent a fair bit of my childhood moving around from place to place, as my father was a civil engineer working on infrastructure projects of various sorts around the world. I spent six years in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I went to high school. My undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Following Princeton, I went to work for an international oilfield services company: Schlumberger. I spent a year in Algeria, and another in Nigeria before leaving Schlumberger. From there I went to Israel, where I spent a year studying Aeronautics at the Technion in Haifa. After my return from Israel, I started at Stanford University, in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department. I received both my Masters and Ph.D. from Stanford, where I built an autonomous catamaran for my thesis. The catamaran was based on a modified Prindle-19, with the mast removed and replaced by a freely rotating wingsail. After graduation, I spent a year in Los Angeles consulting on an autonomous ground vehicle project. I joined the Computer Engineering Faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2003, with a research focus on autonomous and embedded systems. I started the Autonomous Systems Lab, and have a number of graduate and undergraduate students working with me on a variety of research projects. During the reshaping, I moved to the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, along with the rest of the Robotics Engineering faculty. My favorite (and most popular) class to teach is ECE118, Introduction to Mechatronics, where teams of students build a robot in 10 weeks. I enjoy my four young sons, and living near the Ocean on the West Side of Santa Cruz.

Research Interests

• Embedded systems
• Robust software architectures for real-time reactive systems
• Sensor fusion; guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) system identification
• Robust and advanced control schemes
• Feedback and control systems
• Robotics
• Unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs)
• Cooperative control