Faculty & Staff

Biography

Dr. Tantaris obtained a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Vanderbilt University with a concentration in Controls Engineering. He has undergraduate and master's degrees in Electrical engineering. Dr. Tantaris has over 15 years of experience in industry serving in a number of roles including Program Manager, Test Director, and Lead System Engineer. His career in industry started at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in Los Angeles where he designed and implemented a flight hardware test program. In addition, he worked on the Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod analyzing flight data to diagnose control anomalies and designing new tracking algorithms. Wanting to return to the South, Dr. Tantaris accepted a position with Southern Research Institute where he worked in a variety of roles to support multiple large government/DOD projects including the Airborne Imaging and Recording System (AIRS), a large, high attitude, gimballed sensor system.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University
• Dissertation: "First order controllers: stability, performance, and robustness".
• M.E., Electrical Engineering, Tennessee State University

Honors & Awards

• Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Served on the Executive Committee of the Alabama section of IEEE 2016 - 2017

Expertise

• Engineering education, Line-of- Sight (LOS) control, control systems (nonlinear, modern, parametric/robust, adaptive), system modeling, inertial navigation (strap-down and stable platform), MEMs, finite element analysis, robotics (modeling and control design/simulation), vision systems, and image processing

Recent Publications

• R. N. Tantaris, "Optimal scheduling of a multi-user, multi-tasking automatic robotic telescope", Proceedings of the NASA URC Technical Conference, vol. II, pp. 137-142, Huntsville, Alabama, Feb. 22-25, 1998.

• R. N. Tantaris, L. H. Keel, and S. P. Battacharyya, "Stabilization of continuous time systems by first order controllers", Proceedings of the 10th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, Lisbon, Portugal, July 9-12, 2002.

• R. N. Tantaris, L. H. Keel, and S. P. Battacharyya, "Stabilization of discrete time systems by first order controllers", Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Las Vegas, Nevada, Dec. 2002.