Timeless Research: Control Systems Expert Lands Spot On Top Twenty List
Technology changes at an increasingly rapid pace but underlying physical and mathematical principles remain the same. Dr. Mark W. Spong, professor of systems engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and Excellence in Education Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas, was recently recognized for his work’s lasting influence on the fields of robotics and control systems.
Doradolist, a website that provides curated book recommendations specifically for readers at universities, listed Spong’s 1988 article on its list of the 21 most cited control theory papers. Spong’s article, “Bilateral Control of Teleoperators With Time Delay,” describes a control law for teleoperators that overcomes instability caused by time delay. The paper has received more than 2,980 citations and counting according to Google Scholar. The work is also featured on the NASA website for its implications for remote robotics applications.
“The work of my first PhD student, Robert Anderson, solved an important problem that had been open for more than 25 years,” Spong said. “His work had a major impact on the field of bilateral teleoperation and stimulated a huge amount of subsequent research around the world. It is gratifying to see our paper listed as one of the most highly cited papers in control.”
Control theory is a branch of applied mathematics using a feedback system working toward a specific desired outcome. At the time of publication, the paper described Spong’s and co-author Dr. Robert Anderson’s solution to the problem originally identified in 1966 for maintaining a “force reflecting bilateral teleoperator in the presence of substantial time delay.”
The solution was tested at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
A bilateral control system allows a human operator to interact with a remote device and then receive feedback from the remote system, but it can be affected by a time delay. The bilateral control law was proposed as stable for any environment and any time delay, and the article describes results on how the law was applied to a single-axis force-reflecting hand controller.
In 2023, Spong, former dean of the Jonsson School, delivered the University’s prestigious Polykarp Kusch Lecture, where he described how robotics has evolved through history. Because his work focuses on physics-based modeling and control, the concepts and observations he described 40 years ago still apply today. Spong’s other highly cited works include two popular robotics textbooks that he co-authored entitled Robot Dynamics and Control and Robot Modeling and Control.