Vadim Ivanovich Utkin (; 30 October 1937 – 18 September 2022) was a

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

- American

control theorist Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...

, electrical engineer and a professor of Electrical Engineering and

Mechanical Engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, an ...

at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

. He is best known for being one of the originators of

Sliding Mode Control In control systems, sliding mode control (SMC) is a nonlinear control method that alters the dynamics of a nonlinear system by applying a discontinuous control signal (or more rigorously, a set-valued control signal) that forces the system to ...

and Variable Structure Systems, which have become fundamental concepts in the field of nonlinear control (e.g.

robust control In control theory, robust control is an approach to controller design that explicitly deals with uncertainty. Robust control methods are designed to function properly provided that uncertain parameters or disturbances are found within some (typicall ...

Biography

Utkin was born in Moscow, Russia. He was with the Institute of Control Sciences from 1960 to 1994, where he served as its Head of Discontinuous Control Systems Laboratory from 1973 to 1994. He joined the

in 1994 as the Ford Chair of Electromechanical Systems, and was the first professor to hold this distinction until 2002. He was an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

, and he has been the recipient of awards such as the Lenin Prize and the

Humboldt Prize The Humboldt Prize, the Humboldt-Forschungspreis in German, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of G ...

. He also holds honorary doctorates from the

University of Sarajevo The University of Sarajevo ( Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian: ''Univerzitet u Sarajevu'' / Sveučilište u Sarajevu / Универзитет у Сарајеву) is a public university located in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is the largest ...

and Rovira and Vergil University.

Selected works

* ''Sliding Modes and their Applications in Variable Structure Systems''. Mir, Moscow, 1978. * ''Sliding Modes in Control and Optimization'', Springer Verlag, 1992. * ''Sliding Mode Control in Electro-Mechanical Systems'', Taylor & Frencis. 1st edition 1999, 2nd edition 2009.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Utkin, Vadim 1937 births 2022 deaths Control theorists Fellow Members of the IEEE Ohio State University faculty Russian emigrants to the United States Scientists from Moscow