Editorial:special issue on frontiers of control and automation,dedicated to Prof.Ben M.Chen 60th birthday

Jie Chen·Jie Huang·Lihua Xie

It is our great pleasure and honor to organize this special issue“Frontiers of Control and Automation”in honor of the 60th birthday of our long-time colleague and friend Professor Ben M.Chen.

Professor Chen obtained his B.Sc.degree in mathematics and computer science in 1983 from Xiamen University,China;M.Sc.degree in electrical engineering in 1988 from Gonzaga University,Spokane,Washington,USA;and Ph.D.degree in electrical and computer engineering in 1991 from Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA.He started his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, in 1992.He moved to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore in 1993,where he later became a Provost’s Chair Professor.Since 2018, he has been a Professor with the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.Professor Chen’s early research interests include several topics of linear systems theory and control theory such as H∞/H2optimal control,robust control,and nonlinear control.He gradually shifted his research to application-oriented topics such as hard disk drive servo systems in late 1990s and then to unmanned systems in 2003.He has authored/co-authored hundreds of journal and conference articles,and ten research monographs in control theory and applications, unmanned systems and financial market modeling.He has served on the editorial boards of a dozen international journals including Science China:Information Sciences,Control Theory and Technology,Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.He is currently serving as an Editor-in-Chief of Unmanned Systems and an Editor of International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.He has nurtured 61 graduate students including 36 PhD students and 25 master students and is currently supervising 23 Ph.D.candidates.Professor Chen is an IEEE Fellow,CAA Fellow and Fellow of Academy of Engineering,Singapore.

The research outcomes of Professor Chen have not only impacted significantly on the fields of both control and unmanned systems and their applications, but also generated a number of new research issues that are worth further investigating.This special issue has selected 18 papers from Professor Chen’s former students,postdoctoral fellows,collaborators, and friends.We hope this special issue will not only reflect the current research activities on such topics as cooperative control and estimation of multi-agent systems,switched systems,nonlinear control,AI-driven vehicle control,control of magnetic levitation systems,distributed Nash equilibrium seeking,vision-based target motion estimation,reinforce learning and optimization, predictive control for robotic manipulators, hybrid method for vehicle trajectory prediction,etc.,but also point some new directions for further exploring.

We are very grateful to Professor Hailong Pei, Editorin-Chief ofControl Theory&Applications,Yiguang Hong,Editor-in-Chief ofControl Theory and Technology,for inviting us to edit this special issue,and for their advices in the process of preparing this issue,and to Ms.Tiefeng Zou,the Production Editor of this Journal,for her indispensable support and helps.We also wish to express our most sincere thanks to all the authors and reviewers of this issue who have made this special issue possible.

Jie Chen,Jie Huang,Lihua Xie

Guest Editors