Ing. Zdeněk Hurák, Ph.D.

Dr. Zdeněk Hurák (*1974) is an assistant professor at the Department of Control Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague and the head of the aa4cc group. He received his Ing. degree (equivalent to M.Sc. or Dipl.Ing.) in aerospace electrical engineering (summa cum laude) at Military Academy, Brno, Czech Republic, in 1997. While staying as a teaching assistant at the same institute, he was awarded Boeing Fellowship in 1999, which supported his 3-month stay at Iowa State University, Ames, USA. In 2000 he started his Ph.D. study in cybernetics and robotics under supervision of Michael Šebek at Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic, and defended it in 2004 with the thesis on l1 optimal control (some results published in the prestigious SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization). He was a visiting researcher at TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 2008.

These days he gives graduate lectures on optimal and robust control and undergraduate lectures on modeling and simulation of dynamic systems. He supervises graduate and doctoral students, and manages research projects with academic and industrial partners. His research interests include numerical algorithms for optimal and robust control, especially within the polynomial (algebraic) framework, and applications of advanced control schemes in electromechanical systems such as inertially stabilized camera platforms, piezoelectric micro-manipulators and even non-contact micro-manipulation such as dielectrophoresis. He serves the community as a chair of Control Systems Chapter of Czech-Slovak Section of IEEE, and as a member of the editorial board of Kybernetika and Automa journals.