Rate My Professor Alejandro Donaire

Donaire's research focuses on modelling, analysis, and design of nonlinear control systems, with particular interest in passivity-based control methods, including interconnection and damping assignment (IDA-PBC), for nonlinear physical systems such as port-Hamiltonian systems. His applications span marine and aerospace mechatronics, multi-agent systems, robotics, smart micro-grids networks, electrical drives, and power systems. Fields of Research include Control Engineering (50%) and Calculus of variations, mathematical aspects of systems theory and control theory (50%). He has co-authored the book 'PID Passivity-Based Control of Nonlinear Systems with Applications' (2021), 6 book chapters such as 'Holonomic Rolling Nonprehensile Manipulation Primitive' (2022) and 'Passivity-based control design and experiments for a rolling-balancing system' (2018), 39 journal articles including 'Robust Consensus of a Class of Perturbed Port-Hamiltonian Systems With Time Delays' (2025) and 'Integral passivity-based control of an underactuated hydraulic soft manipulator with uncertain nonlinear stiffness' (2024), and 65 conference papers. Donaire has received the University of Newcastle Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2011), 2010 Research Fellowship - PRCCDSC ($457,796), ARC Discovery Project 'Safe, Plug and Play, Multi Agent Dynamic Systems' (2022-2024, $447,948), and several Defence Science and Technology Group grants.