Rate My Professor Wen-Hua Chen

Professor Wen-Hua Chen holds the position of Professor in Autonomous Vehicles and EPSRC Established Career Fellow in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University. He earned his BEng in Industrial Automation from Jiangsu University in 1986, MSc in Control Engineering from Northeastern University, China in 1989, and PhD in Control Engineering from the same university in 1991. His career began as Lecturer and Associate Professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1991 to 1997, followed by roles as Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Glasgow from 1997 to 2000. At Loughborough, he advanced from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer in Flight Control Systems between 2000 and 2012, and was appointed Chair in Autonomous Vehicles in 2012. He founded the Loughborough Centre for Autonomous Systems and Control (LUCAS) in 2012, leads the Control and Reliability Research Group, and heads LUCAS.

Professor Chen's research specializations include fundamental control theory for highly automated systems (Goal-Oriented Control Systems framework), advanced control (nonlinear, robust, disturbance observer-based, model predictive control), signal processing (computer vision, data fusion), and autonomous system technologies (autopilot, navigation, collision avoidance, path planning, situational awareness, decision making under uncertainty). Applications cover agriculture and environmental monitoring, disaster management, and safety verification for autonomous vehicles. With over 350 publications and more than 20,000 citations, key works include "AI meets UAVs: a survey on AI empowered UAV perception systems for precision agriculture" (Neurocomputing, 2023), "Perspective View of Autonomous Control in Unknown Environment: Dual Control for Exploitation and Exploration vs Reinforcement Learning" (Neurocomputing, 2022), and "Dual control for exploration and exploitation in autonomous search" (Automatica, 2021). He has received the EPSRC Established Career Fellowship (2020–2025), Changjiang Scholar by the Ministry of Education of China (2014), Charles Shape Beecher Prize (2013), FIEEE (2018), FIET (2013), FIMechE (2015), and FHEA (2003). Professor Chen delivers invited lectures at universities worldwide and serves on the EPSRC Peer Review College, IEEE Technical Committee on Aerospace Control, and editorial boards including IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles.