P.S.Krishnaprasad

Perinkulam Sambamurthy Krishnaprasad (commonly cited as P. S. Krishnaprasad) is an Indian-American electrical engineer and applied mathematician. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on geometric control theory, geometric mechanics, robotics, and biologically-inspired control systems.

Krishnaprasad was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1990 for his contributions to geometric and nonlinear control and to engineering education. His doctoral advisor was Roger W. Brockett, a pioneer of modern control theory who later co-founded the Institute for Systems Research with Krishnaprasad and others.

Career After completing his doctorate, Krishnaprasad joined the faculty of the Systems Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University, where he taught from 1977 to 1980.

Bat echolocation and pursuit strategies Krishnaprasad has conducted research on the prey capture strategies of echolocating bats, demonstrating that they use a nearly time-optimal interception strategy similar to that implemented in guided missiles. This research, published in PLOS Biology in 2006, showed that bats use a constant absolute target direction strategy rather than the constant bearing strategy used by many other predators.

Collective behavior and formations His current research focuses on collective behavior in biological systems and its applications to engineered systems, including robotic swarms. This includes work on steering laws for planar formations and motion camouflage strategies observed in pursuit behaviors.

Notable students Krishnaprasad has advised more than 30 doctoral students, many of whom have become prominent researchers in control theory and robotics. Xiaobo Tan (Ph.D. 2002), MSU Foundation Professor at Michigan State University and IEEE Fellow Fumin Zhang (Ph.D. 2004), professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and IEEE Fellow

Awards and honors IEEE Fellow, 1990, "for contributions to geometric and nonlinear control and to engineering education" Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty Award, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland (1990–1991, 2008–2009) Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow, University of Maryland (1998–2000) American Helicopter Society Grover E. Bell Award (team member), 2002, for work on smart structures at the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Research Center Munich Mathematical Colloquium Lecturer, October 2006 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize, IEEE Control Systems Society, 2007, "for fundamental contributions to the theory of control of natural and synthetic systems"