Duarte Antunes

Biography

Duarte Antunes is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Technology, Eindhoven (TU/e). He is part of the Control Systems Technology Group. His teaching and research activities revolve around control theory. Building upon a strong mathematical formalism, control theory deals with decision-making problems throughout time, where a desired behavior for a system needs to be achieved. Examples include a lithography machine to be placed with nanometer precision, an autonomous car avoiding obstacles, a cell regulating its mRNA, an economical agent maximizing its profit. Duarte’s research expertise lies in optimal and stochastic control and networked control systems. Optimally controlling a large-dimensional system is hampered by the so-called curse of dimensionality, and one of Duarte’s research interests is to find approximate control strategies, which are close to optimal. Another strong research interest is control systems interconnected by communication networks, such as a robot that off-loads computationally demanding tasks to the cloud. Here, not only latencies have to be taken into account, but also the use of the cloud is expensive, which leads to using control only when needed (event-triggered control). Recently, he started working on robotics, in particular, quadcopters.