Homepage -- Tom Paré

Thomas E. Paré
Ph.D. Candidate and Hughes Doctoral Fellow.

Stanford University Mechanical Engineering
Durand Room 011, Phone: (650) 725-3287, E-mail: tpare@stanford.edu

If you have any questions, comments, please email: tpare@sun-valley.stanford.edu.

Work Experience

Most of my work days are spent at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles. I design control systems for spacecraft payloads. This work usually involves precision pointing payloads that go on a variety of spacecraft, typically the HS601 (shown). Most recently, I designed the infrared payload pointing control system for the Brilliant Eyes spacecraft (SBIRS_Low), and built a breadboard system to verify critical line-of-sight pointing control capabilities of the main payload. Two demonstration systems featuring many elements of this design are scheduled for launch in September 1999.

Research Interests

My research advisor is Professor Jon How, who is also co-director of the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory. My primary focus while at Stanford has been in control system design for nonlinear systems. I find hysteresis nonlinearities the most challenging, and I've written a few papers on how to determine stability, performance and design controllers for systems with hysteresis using linear matrix inequalities. Systems that have saturation are another effect common in real world practice that I've looked at.

Thesis Defense

Big milestone on 25 January 1999: Defended my research! Special thanks to my thesis committee, Profs. Jon How, Gene Franklin, Stephen Boyd, Claire Tomlin and Chris Gerdes for all their support. Click here to see my talk, Analysis and Control of Systems with Hysteresis: [Part 1]; [Part 2.]

Publications

Education

I attended MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I studied Mechanical Engineering. I lived on Burton Third, and was a Burton Third Bomber while there. A great living group. For graduate school, I came to Stanford as a Hughes Master's and then Doctoral Fellow.

Last updated 2/10/99, by T.E. Paré